Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle by Alex Murray (review)

Alex Murray generously places Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle within the context of current studies on Decadent British writers, but he offers a fresh perspective on Decadent writing. His work beautifully demonstrates the richness and continuing appeal of a movement that epitomizes stylistic experimentation. For Murray, landscape is a literary trope that authors could use to represent their struggles with modernity and materialism. London, Paris, and other cities led Decadent writers to adopt a style that mirrored the artificial, constructed nature of these places. The new high-rises, electricity, underground transportation, even cafes and restaurants, all were artificial, manmade structures. In order to respond appropriately to the cacophony of sights and sounds assaulting the flâneur, writers in English frequently followed their French predecessors, but, deeply immersed in English literature, they shaped a different kind of response to what they saw and experienced. Decadent writers seem most modern in their acknowledgement of a unique, rather than universal, vision of a place. Their distinctively artificial writing style expressed a powerful nostalgia for an alternative place that honored aesthetics and spirituality.

Many of the authors Murray discusses found Paris and its cosmopolitan ways magnetic—or disturbingly dissolute. He first describes the numerous novels and essays written to warn naive English-speaking youth about the dangers of Paris, with its seductive women, art, and cafes. This preamble provides a useful comparison with the Decadents who adored Paris; their treatment of pleasure for its own sake seems more daring and innovative in the context of the warnings against Parisian culture. George Moore, whom Murray discusses at some length, never recovered from his eight years in Paris, where he believed he had been able to shed his unformed, awkward personality for something more sophisticated and more open to experience. No one tried harder to transplant French Naturalism into London; the result was "a writing that is 'foreign' to the city, foregrounding literary form rather than architecture, culture or history" (67). A Modern Lover (1883), for Murray, turns London into a blank slate "that attempts to challenge and undermine any sense that the city is the site of imaginative response" (68). Walking the streets of the city does not yield any sense of a specific urban landscape, but instead gives the reader an imprecise, textual sense of place. For Murray, the creation of strikingly literary landscapes defines the Decadent Movement.

Murray traces in other authors as well this effort to describe obscure, restless impressions, even as he shifts to consider, for example, the turn to Roman Catholicism by such poets as Lionel Johnson or to the Celtic Revival by the Anglo-Welsh author Arthur Machen. Murray is especially interesting in his dissection of late nineteenth-century Oxford, where undergraduates were torn between a Hellenism of reason and idealism and a Roman Catholicism of spiritual renewal and faith. Both, of course, offered privileged youth an escape from the rapidly expanding (and industrializing) Oxford suburbs that had overwhelmed an illusory community of men living amidst beautiful antique buildings. Murray neglects a third issue confronting young Oxonians, namely the growth of the women's colleges and of feminism. As in many imagined communities, more students were excluded than were welcomed. Johnson appears to have managed his disappointment with present-day Oxford by studying the literary past all night and sleeping all day. He also actively chose separation from its homoerotic community by becoming a Roman Catholic. Murray concludes that Johnson's Oxford poetry captures a deeply felt desire for religion, even at the cost of showing "the extent to which religious and moral orthodoxies are themselves unnatural" (120).

Like Johnson and other religiously-inclined Decadents, Machen accepted mysticism and the irrational as essential antidotes to the pervasive materialism of modern life. Conservative anti-modernists shared with their fellow Decadents a proclivity for elaborate aestheticized descriptions, creating what Murray calls "linguistic...