Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, edited by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Michael Field: Decadent Moderns ed. by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo Veronica Alfano (bio) Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, edited by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo; pp. ix + 289. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019, $80.00. As Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo point out in the introduction to their impressive and timely collection Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, to study Michael Field (that is, Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper) is to encounter a series of "contradictions, paradoxes, and complexities" (3). Here are two women who publish under a man's name, a lesbian couple who convert to Catholicism and who blend Christian with pagan images, a pair of poets heavily influenced by the ancient past who nonetheless embrace modernity. True to its apparently paradoxical name, this book links Field to late-Victorian, twentieth-century, and contemporary cultures, thus "challenging traditional boundaries between fin-de-siècle and modernist studies" (21). The interdisciplinarity of these excellent essays, which touch on topics ranging from disability studies to book art to environmental humanities, serves both to transcend and to enrich the more familiar conceptual frameworks of Decadence and aestheticism. I will respond to the editors' call to "seek out thematic and formal connections" in Michael Field: Decadent Moderns by discussing the chapters in an order of my own choosing (16). In chapter 1, Kate Thomas explores Field's fascination with plant life, positioning them not against but within nature. Readings of poems and diary entries—along with a wonderfully detailed analysis of Bradley and Cooper's insignia, the bramble-bough, as a symbol of intergenerational love—link Field to queer ecology and queer temporality, evoking "a lush and present world, a riot of intertwinings … a cyclical, fleshy foreverness" (32). Thomas complicates this picture, confirming the volume's commitment to interdisciplinarity, by showing how Field describes the botanical realm via the language of both gender and race. [End Page 165] Like Thomas's investigation of racist imagery, Kristin Mahoney's assessment in chapter 10 of the relationship between Field and the sculptor Eric Gill reminds us that Decadent dissidence and its modernist afterlives "did not always result in just or liberatory practices" (235). Of course, Mahoney does not condone Gill's sexual abuse of his daughters. But she does astutely observe that for Gill and Field alike, a queer and highly eroticized version of Catholicism generates "radical questioning of kinship structures" (244). Perhaps this chapter will inspire more critical responses to the incestuous nature of Cooper and Bradley's relationship, which has rarely been addressed. Vadillo's chapter echoes Mahoney's interest in sculpture and establishes a useful blueprint for reading Field through material history. She makes a convincing case that a "sculptural aesthetic" underlies the themes and forms of Field's early poetry, inspires the beautiful white bindings of what she calls their "marble books," and informs "the very concept of their fragmented authorship" (68). In writing the verse drama Bellerophôn (1881), for instance, Field not only draws on observations of broken statues at the British Museum but also employs sculptural methods as metaphors for joint composition. To date, criticism of Field has tended to concentrate on their lyrics. But Joseph Bristow joins Vadillo in turning instead to their verse dramas—in particular, A Question of Memory (1893) and Attila, My Attila! (1895), both of which received extremely negative reviews. Evaluating Bradley and Cooper's responses to the criticism they received from strangers and friends alike, Bristow's engaging essay ties some of these critiques to the way in which Field's "antiquated and avant-garde" dramas seem to hover "both behind and ahead of a modern theatrical world" (145). Attila, My Attila!, for instance, transforms a Roman princess into a sexually liberated New Woman. Bristow charts Field's fraught relationships with friends who did not consistently admire their work; Parker takes up this concern in chapter 4 via art historian Mary Costelloe, whom Cooper and Bradley met in 1891 and who would later criticize Attila, My Attila!. Deftly juxtaposing Costelloe's writing with Field's ekphrastic poetic volume Sight and Song (1892), Parker associates the three women with "a shared project of art historical investigation" that...