“I want bad things – strong bad things”: Ouida, Walter Pater, and aestheticism in Dorothy Richardson’s Backwater (1916)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Backwater (1916), the second installment of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, the protagonist Miriam Henderson reads the aesthetic romances of Ouida (1839–1908), which become the “center of her life,” and lead to her striking declaration: “I am myself.” The significance of Miriam’s reading of Ouida, however, has long been overlooked within Richardson scholarship. Ouida, a popular bestseller scorned by contemporary critics, was at the same time lauded by aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm for her lush prose and representation of eroticism. As a popular novelist, Ouida’s fiction is at odds with the high-brow modernism with which Pilgrimage is typically associated. And yet, Ouida’s aesthetic fictions have the power to influence Miriam’s personal development and instigate her decisive casting off of the domestic femininity promoted by conventional women’s novels and initiate her desire for “bad things.” Furthermore, these episodes enable a recognition of the way Pilgrimage’s focus on consciousness over plot and eschewal of teleology have a close affinity with Walter Pater’s aestheticism. Miriam’s gender deviance that is embodied in Richardson’s formal innovations belong to a genealogy of aesthetic fiction that is marked by its celebration of dissident desire and of experience for its own sake.