Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Julia Skelly (bio) Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray; pp. vii + 304. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, $54.95. If not precisely a poisonous book, Decadence in the Age of Modernism does burn with a hard, gem-like flame. Each chapter in Kate Hext and Alex Murray’s edited volume sings voluptuously with illuminating archival research and close readings of both canonical and understudied texts; many of the essays display a self-consciously Decadent style with luscious prose, insightful asides, and Wildean witticisms. Form and content fit beautifully together in this volume that is, if not exactly groundbreaking, then certainly an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Decadent modernisms. Born out of a 2015 conference on “Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism,” this tight collection of eleven essays, in addition to the editors’ introduction, usefully surveys the scholarship on literary Decadence, demonstrating clearly that early twentieth-century modernism did not break so cleanly from Decadence as modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot proposed. Rather, it was a source of both inspiration and anxiety for writers during the age of modernism. The decision by Hext and Murray to frame the volume by those words—“the age of modernism”—rather than “Decadent modernism,” or “Decadence and modernism,” was productively strategic. As they note, not all of the authors discussed in the book fit comfortably into the ideological category of modernist literature. Indeed, while some of the chapters show that a selection [End Page 471] of understudied Decadent novelists and poets deserve the label of modernist, the overall objective of the collection is not to insert new writers into the modernist canon but rather to demonstrate that Decadence and modernism were in close, if tense, conversation in the period from 1895 (the year of Oscar Wilde’s trials) to the First World War. Each chapter in this collection is a pleasure to read. Written in different styles, each essay is elegantly composed, and the book fits (almost) seamlessly together as a whole. The only outlier is Joseph Bristow’s contribution, “‘A Poetess of No Mean Order’: Margaret Sackville, Women’s Poetry, and the Legacy of Aestheticism,” since, as Bristow’s title indicates, Sackville was influenced by literary aestheticism, and roundly rejected Decadence as “a pleasure in dark and doubtful places, a cynicism which looks upon itself with a sad, half-admiring pity” (qtd. in Bristow 99–100) that is enacted through “the babbling of little men” (qtd. in Bristow 100). Nevertheless, a rejection of Decadence is still an engagement with it, and one can understand Hext and Murray’s choice to include Bristow’s essay, particularly as it contributes to the still-understudied work of female aesthetes, and builds on work such as Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades’s groundbreaking edited volume Women and British Aestheticism (1999). Sarah Parker’s chapter, “Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Decadence,” also contributes to the study of female aesthetes, but pays more attention to Decadent themes and forms. All of the other chapters are delectably dedicated to Decadence. Kristin Mahoney’s essay, “Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson and Post-Victorian Decadent Feminism,” is crucial reading for feminist scholars concerned with Decadence. Leverson, a staunch defender of Wilde until the very end, was hyper-aware of the misogynistic subtext of literary Decadence, and as Mahoney observes, “Leverson’s relationships with the decadents themselves were as complicated as her relationship to the decadent aesthetic” (30). To my mind, the most important contribution of the entire volume is the repeated revelation of the queerness of Decadence at the fin de siècle, when, as Mahoney remarks, “the turn to decadence had begun to operate as a queer alternative to high modernism” (27). As Hext and Murray explain, “the uneven critical history of the decadent movement has largely been one of recovery since the 1960s . . . and one greatly helped since the late 1980s by the influence of Queer Criticism and Gay Studies” (7). Like Mahoney, Ellis Hanson, Kirsten MacLeod, and Michèle Mendelssohn foreground how early twentieth-century Decadence functioned as an...