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  • Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914
  • Talia Schaffer (bio)
Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914, by Ruth Livesey; pp. viii + 236. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007, £30.00, $60.00.

Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 is a remarkably knowledgeable study of the varieties of British socialism at the turn of the century. Ruth Livesey draws on her expertise about the personalities, philosophies, affiliations, and influences of the movement to map out complicated interrelations of rival groups. In so doing, she persuasively suggests a new reading of British socialist aesthetics.

Livesey points out that William Morris "has long proven troublesome to those seeking to place him in the history of the aesthetic movement and the rise of modernism" (20). But for Livesey, Morris is a crucial point of origin for important strains of socialism, aestheticism, and modernism between 1880 and 1914. She shows that his dream of a collectivist, ethical, labor-rich environment for art production was deeply empowering, particularly for women like Clementina Black, Olive Schreiner, and Dollie Radford. Another group, however, followed the Kantian ideal of a disinterested, autonomous art. The autonomous school eventually abandoned social labor (as Livesey shows by tracing the careers of Alfred Orage and Virginia Woolf). Meanwhile, the ethical, female-friendly, fellowship/ guild socialism derived from Morris underwent various permutations, including attempts by Edward Carpenter and G. B. Shaw to improve virile bodies through discipline of dress and diet, and the prewar neo-pagan practices of Rupert Brooke and his circle. In the 1880s, it seemed, one could have it all: socialist revolution and art and a new lifestyle. But this fragile balance increasingly splintered into opposing groups. After 1910, autonomous art ruled the modernist realm.

After an excellent brief introduction providing crisp thumbnail definitions of the various movements the book tackles, Livesey offers an explication of Morris's brand of socialism, rooted in ethical, communitarian, masculine labor, as contrasted with the alternative: Paterian and Wildean individualism and cultivation of the artistic sensibility.

Among those who tried to live out Morris's ideal of fellowship were several important women. Livesey explains why Black found Morrisian socialism conducive to her cause of insisting on the value of women's labor (including her own). As Livesey shows in her second chapter, however, Black had to battle not only prurient speculation about her "real" (romantic) motives but also the aestheticizing perspective that scanned her work only for prettiness. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Schreiner similarly enjoyed the Morrisian idea of communalism and the way it accommodated a poetic, artistic particularism. "Paradoxical though it may seem," Livesey explains, "Morris's equation of the artist with the productive virile man provided a means for middle-class women artists to insert themselves into a history of productivity and engaged social action" (101). Somewhat differently, as Livesey explains in chapter 5, Radford explored the tension between the individualist ethos of feminized taste (the Oscar Wilde lineage) [End Page 525] and the socialist ethos of manly labor (the Morris heritage), seeking the best home for her own affective, feminized, lyrical tradition.

If these chapters show how female fin-de-siècle reformers enjoyed Morris's space of possibility, it is chapter 4 that provides a refreshing comic interlude as it turns to the men. Livesey explains the appeal of "faddish" socialism. The religion of socialism meant idealist bodily behavior: vegetarianism, homemade sandals, Jaeger woollens, the simple life. Morris's stress on labor licensed both Carpenter and Shaw, in different ways, to imagine that proper dress and diet would generate the virile male body of the future. Perhaps less amusing and more dismaying is Orage's take on the socialist legacy in chapter 6. Famous as the editor of the modernist journal The New Age, Orage leavened its aesthetic pronouncements with Nietzschean heroic individualism, opposing the "effeminate decadence" of ethical socialism (165), which he disdained as sentimental and feminized. Finally, in chapter 7, Livesey offers a brilliantly elegant reading of Woolf. She contrasts the mature Woolf against her own younger socialist self, her husband, her friend Roger Fry, and her...

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