Watched men and phallus-wielding women: Aubrey Beardsley’s reception of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire

Abstract

Abstract In 1896, Aubrey Beardsley, the controversial poster child for the Decadent movement in Britain, set to work on a collection of drawings inspired by Juvenal’s Sixth Satire. The resultant works — which depict Bathyllus dancing, Messalina returning unsatisfied from the baths, an ‘impatient adulterer’ spying on his mistress, and a final image (not found in the ancient text) of Juvenal whipping a woman — are composed in Beardsley’s iconic style of stark black lines against a white page, simple yet grotesquely erotic. In both the passages that Beardsley selected to represent and his subversive and gender-bending representations, Beardsley exploits the text’s latent homoeroticism, skewers the speaker’s acerbic misogyny, and inverts late antique — and, by extension, Victorian — sexual power structures. While men are depicted as the (knowing or unknowing) subjects of the gaze, women are represented as defiant, returning and refusing the subjection of patriarchal power structures. This paper explores the ways in which Beardsley’s illustrations represent his ‘uncooperative reading’ of the text, wherein Juvenal’s monstrous, dominant women are cast as the heroines of his decadent, grotesque fantasy.