From Decadence to Degeneration: The Big Sleep, its forceful plot, and a femme fatale 'still in the dangerous twenties'

Abstract

Tasked with naming an exemplary decadent artist, scholars often turn to Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). In his epigrams, essays, plays, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde calls for an ‘art for art’s sake’ that underscores a broader assault on nineteenth-century lifeways. As his 1895 trial on gross indecency demonstrates, however, British society refused to accept aesthetics as a domain accountable to beauty alone or to condone the new masculine identities that his work championed. A modern novel, Dorian Gray anticipates both refusals, insofar as it shows the protagonist’s pursuit of sensation to be intensely compelling while warning that his decadent experience, however wittily expressed or secured by wealth, carries with it the potential for physical degeneration. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) has long been treated as a terse, hardboiled novel by readers, and rightly so. Its mean streets—built up from the example of Dashiell Hammett—would therefore seem to be far removed from decadents like Wilde and the airy experiments of The Yellow Book. But Chandler (1888-1959), a Chicago-born American who came of age in turn-of-the-century London, is no stranger to the decadent movement; and his dark realism recalls Wilde’s project by depicting a set of characters whose lives of static privilege compel a descent into a criminal underworld. For Dorian Gray as well as for the Sternwood family, then, decadent experience leads to dissolution, and dissolution—however much it might resonate with social critique—compels personal and narrative degeneration. In the reading of The Big Sleep that follows, I return decadence and the science of degeneration to interpretive prominence so that the force driving Chandler’s strange double plot and its femme fatale’s criminal designs may be conceived anew.