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 The Pleasures of Decadence: Catholicism in Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, and Anne Rice Since the s, when Kate Chopin’s fiction began to be rediscovered by feminist critics, the initial reception of The Awakening has passed into literary history as the story of a great but unsurprising atrocity. According to this narrative, a gifted writer, successful as a local colorist, is effectively silenced when she undertakes her greatest work because her contemporaries, blinded by the pieties of the genteel tradition, cannot recognize its value. In the preface to her first biography of Chopin, Emily Toth describes her own discovery of The Awakening in these words: ‘‘I . . . was astonished that a woman in  had asked the same questions that we, in the newly revived women ’s movement, were asking seventy years later. . . . How had Kate Chopin known all that in ?’’1 Toth’s question suggests that Chopin was a splendid anachronism, a genius who would have to wait for the right readers. In other words, it dehistoricizes her, precluding the possibility that her hostile readers may have reacted not out of incomprehension but out of a political and aesthetic opposition that identified in The Awakening the same content celebrated by recent critics: the frank portrayal of a woman’s desires for autonomy and sexual fulfillment. To be sure, the novel’s early reviews, some of which have become famous in their own right, often used the language of physical and mental illness—a tic that might seem proof of the reviewers’ obtuseness. The Chicago Times-Herald dismissed the novel as an example of ‘‘sex fiction’’; the Los Angeles Sunday Times labeled it ‘‘unhealthily introspective and morbid,’’ and Willa Cather (writing for the Pittsburgh Leader) lamented the fact that Edna Pontellier’s particular ‘‘disease’’ afflicts ‘‘women of strong and fine intuitions .’’2 Yet such rhetoric also points toward a dimension of Chopin’s work that these reviewers may have understood better than we do—its affinities with the style and sensibility of decadence, that fin de siècle aesthetic most often associated with French and English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The Pleasures of Decadence  As a literary-historical phenomenon, decadence is notoriously difficult to define. Not only do many of its characteristics overlap with those of other contemporary terms, including Symbolism, Impressionism, and la belle époque, its writers and theorists used the word in a variety of senses. Even so, according to critical consensus, decadence first emerges as a widespread phenomenon in France in the mid-nineteenth century, eventually making its way to England, where it flourishes in the ‘‘yellow decade’’ of the s, and finally coming to color a great deal of western art and literature by the turn of the century, so that in retrospect it seems a harbinger of the emerging Modernist sensibility. Its key figures include Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde; its indispensable literary forebears include the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe. From the beginning, decadence has had a contradictory aspect. On the one hand, it exemplifies what Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy call ‘‘romantic anticapitalism’’: an outcry against the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the triumphant but vulgar bourgeoisie, and the modern rationalization of life that follows in capitalism’s wake.3 On the other hand, its most common response to these conditions is less a romantic return to nature than a defiant championing of artifice. Such contradictions point toward the fraught historical context from which decadence emerges in France, which includes the failures of the Revolution of  and the Paris Commune in France; the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War; demographic decline, particularly in the country; the rise of socialism, feminism, and anarcho-syndicalism as mass movements. Indeed, throughout Europe, much literary, philosophical, and scientific thought in the period from  to  turned to theories of historical decline to account for these upheavals . Scientists such as Francis Galton and Cesar Lombroso saw evidence of decline in industrialization, criminal behavior, and the alleged atavism of certain physical types; critics such as Max Nordau and historians such as Oswald Spengler applied such theories to culture as a whole, finding intellectual and moral degeneration everywhere.4 Against this backdrop of political and cultural turmoil, decadents both decried and embraced the perceived degeneration of the age, seeking an apolitical escape into art, self-fashioning, and religion that often included a deliberate...

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