Decadent Experience: Conservatism and Modernity

Alex Murray

doi:10.1017/s1060150320000170

Abstract

At the core of literary decadence is a conflicted relationship with modernity. For some decadent writers, the onset of rapid social and technological change could usher in possibilities for living and loving in hitherto unimagined ways, yet for others of a more conservative hue, modernization was to be rejected, tradition embraced. This essay argues that experience can be used as a framework for articulating these very different forms of decadence. The essay begins with an exploration of aesthetic modernity as an attempt to articulate the shock of the new, whereby the experience (present) or sensation becomes the ground for the erosion of collective tradition (experience past). Decadent and aestheticist writers such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde embraced these new experiences, rejecting the “fruits of experience” as a ground for knowledge. In contradistinction to this valorization of sensation, I examine the “conservative” decadent aesthetic of Lionel Johnson and Michael Field. These writers’ embrace of nostalgia and jingoistic nationalism, I argue, demands we expand our current critical frameworks to more fully encompass the politics of decadence.

Highlights

DECADENT SENSATIONBritish decadence inherited from Baudelaire the shock of modernity, with a great many writers embracing the possibilities of sensation
E DITH Cooper (1862–1913), the younger half of the aunt and niece who published as Michael Field, wrote in Works and Days on New Year’s Eve, 1893: “I do not yet realise where modernity is taking me.”1 Among decadent writers, she was far from alone in expressing anxiety at the dramatic social and technological flux of the fin de siècle
“The tendency,” Anderson writes, “to substitute aesthetic modernity for philosophical/political modernity has governed” much of Victorian studies, accompanied with a “significant tendency to associate ‘The Victorian,’ whatever that might mean, with Enlightenment modernity in its more blinkered aspects.”4 Exemplary in this challenge to bourgeois modernity is Wilde, who has been annexed to a liberatory, deconstructive model of critique

Summary

DECADENT SENSATION

British decadence inherited from Baudelaire the shock of modernity, with a great many writers embracing the possibilities of sensation. Pater bequeaths to decadent writers two contradictory imperatives: (1) art offers a concentration of experience as sensation from which you should take pleasure, not knowledge, and (2) art offers a conservation of experiences that offers some ballast for the flux of modernity. Wilde is here seemingly rejecting the fruits of experience; if searching after new experiences and new sensations was to result merely in habit, it was hardly going to be the catalyst for a new individualism In this context our “sin” is to inherit from the past a stable set of moral values that would impede our ability—individual and collective—to find new modes of living. As the narrator of The Picture of Dorian Gray makes clear, the aim of the “new Hedonism” “was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.” The refusal to develop knowledge from experience required the new hedonist to live in a perpetual present, for “it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.” Wilde’s new hedonism was to be found by rejecting any lessons learnt from experience; refusing to impose any hermeneutic frame on sensation was success itself

CONSERVATIVE EXPERIENCE

CONCLUSION