The Dilemma of Decadence

161 on herself ignored by Hanscombe but evident in the wryly humorous distinctions she was always making between herself and Miriam. They testify, for another, to an ironic wit that Hanscombe nowhere takes into account. Thus, when she is quoting Miriam's thoughts in a London cafe, where her disreputable fellow-lodger, Mendizabal, has taken her, It is without even a hint of the irony in Richardson's presentation or the comic character of the entire episode. Hanscombe seems to read quite literally Miriam's naive summary of her absurd companion as "a free man of the world, a continental, a cosmopolitan , a connoisseur of women." Dorothy Richardson would have found this wildly funny. Unfortunately, there are a number of such lapses in Hanscombe's book: mlsreadings of letters as well as passages in Pilgrimage and an occasional bypassing of reliable sources for unreliable ones. Each of these errors is relatively minor: reading Butts for Coutts (p. 31); having the wrong brotherin -law provide a home for Richardson's bankrupt father (p. 64); accepting Babcock for Badcock despite evidence to the contrary (p. 130); identifying a grown woman as the daughter of a man not married long enough (p. 126); describing as a "sexual encounter" Hypo Wilson's failure to seduce Miriam the first time he tries (p. 147); taking Lissie for Trissie (p. 161); but all together they undermine Hanscombe's claim to authority. As a guide through Dorothy Richardson's life and work, following a route that zigzags between the two and argues on abstract, unsubstantiated, and selective grounds for their special nature, she does not—regrettably—inspire confidence. Gloria G. Fromm University of Illinois at Chicago 3. THE DILEMMA OF DECADENCE R. K. R. Thornton. The Decadent Dilemma. London and Baltimore: Edward Arnold, 1983. $39.50 In 1965, Barbara Charlesworth, in The Decadent Consciousness In Victorian Literature, states in her final summary chapter: "The Decadents failed in their lives and in their art." In 1983, R. K. R. Thornton, in The Decadent Dilemma, states in his final summary chapter: "Decadent literature is a literature of failure." Have we progressed, then, in our understanding of Decadence? Is it possible for there to be any reasonable agreement on what Decadence could conceivably mean? Thornton states that an "attempt to define Decadence, like Decadence itself, must end in failure." Such a statement would seem to simplify the reviewer's task, but Thornton is concerned not so much with a "definition" of Decadence as with a description of the "Decadent Dilemma," that is, the unresolved yearning for "worldly things and eternal things. " The failure to resolve this dilemma accounts for the Decadent literature of failure: ... of a failure to provide a literary synthesis for the disintegration of life; of an expression of that dlstintegration and failure in elegant cadences; of a fleeing into an artificial world 162 or an ideal world to escape from the consciousness and consequence of that disintegration; of a somewhat indulgent melancholy at the contemplation of that failure; and of a wistfully gay self-mockery at the beauty and vanity of the attempt to escape that failure. Such judgments—"fleeing," "escape," "indulgent melancholy," "to escape the consequences"—appear to be moral rather than aesthetic judgments, though presumably Thornton implies the latter rather than the former. The precise line of demarcation is, in Thornton's study, difficult to perceive; indeed, Thornton comes uncomfortably close to Max Nordau's wild denunciations in his Degeneration (English trans. 1895), though Nordau Is condemned as one "with no sympathy at all for writers and one suspects precious little for literature ." The first chapter of The Decadent Dilemma is concerned with "The Climate of Decline," which marshals evidence from a number of interesting sources that many in the Victorian period were obsessed by the idea of "decline" in England's power and in individual mental stability, despite the prevailing Darwinian theory of evolution (taken to be "the new metaphor of progress"). Thornton assumes that the "climate" of decline gave impetus to the emergence of Decadence, but Decadence and decline are not necessarily synonymous, and the former is not necessarily the result of the latter. The phenomenon of cultural decline is often in the...