The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch

Abstract

dernity. AN IMAGINARY identification with the feminine permeates much of the writing of the male European avantgarde in the late nineteenth century, a period in which gender norms were being protested and redefined from a variety of standpoints. This of literature, exemplified in a destabilization of traditional models of male bourgeois identity, was linked to an emerging self-conscious aestheticism that set itself in opposition to realist and naturalist conventions.' Seeking to expose the seemingly natural features of the dominant culture as simulacra, the male artist drew upon stylistic and thematic motifs codified as feminine, thereby challenging both sexual and norms. Thus a complex array of alignments and contradictions among the structures of gender, class, and commodity culture both shaped and constrained the contestatory textual politics of the fin de siecle cult of art and artifice. The feminization of male avant-garde texts was, of course, only one of the ways in which gender identities were being reconstituted during the period. Most obviously, feminist movements in various European countries were becoming increasingly vocal in their organized demands that women be allowed access to the public sphere. Indeed, late-nineteenth-century discourses often linked the feminized aesthete and the New Woman, twin symbols of the decadence of the age and focal points of contemporary anxiety about changing gender roles. Yet one can debate the assumption-shared by a number of present-day critics-that this early-modernist appropriation of metaphors of femininity was aligned with the feminist project. I hope to show, to the contrary, that the parodic subversion of gender norms reinscribes more insistently the divisions that the text ostensibly calls into question, revealing deep-seated anxieties about both gender and class in the strenuous repudiation of a vulgar and sentimental aesthetic.