On the Politics of Decadent Rebellion: Beardsley, Japonisme, Rococo

Abstract

The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley created perverse, grotesque illustrations that encapsulate our sense of decadent visuality. This essay explores Beardsley's use of foreign styles, specifically those of nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century France. Looking at Beardsley's illustrations for Salomé (1893) and The Rape of the Lock (1895), the essay argues that the Japanese and French stylistic influences are actually connected, despite their diverse geographies and temporalities. Studying both styles together reveals the ways that decadence embraced hierarchy and the inequality of persons, wielding a surprisingly normative politics of racial and cultural otherness to produce a Victorian counterculture. Decadence harnessed these familiar imperial-era attitudes in strange ways, using models of taboo difference to create a transgressive aesthetics that moved toward both embodiment and abstraction.