Aesthetic Movement Research Articles

Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall: Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings

Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall:Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings U. C. Knoepflmacher (bio) In 1888, the year in which he published The Happy Prince and Other Stories, Oscar Wilde explained that his fairy tales were only "meant partly for children," since they also addressed "those who have kept the child-like faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness" (Letters 215). He seemed to have changed his mind, however, after the 1891 appearance of his Dorian Gray. In a letter in which he boasted about having become enmeshed in "red roses of pleasure," Wilde abruptly dismissed fairy tales as a tepid and bloodless form unsuited for "bodies of flesh" and "souls in turmoil." He thus advised a friend who had sent him a fairy tale manuscript to abandon "such fanciful, winsome work," proclaiming that those who truly "know what passion is, what passions are" should clothe them in "their red raiment, and make them move before us" (315). Yet near the end of his career, Wilde signaled still another turn. In De Profundis, the confessional work written after his humiliating imprisonment, he claimed that tales such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Young King" might well offer some salutary alternatives to "the primrose path" he had taken (De Profundis 92). Oscar Wilde's oscillations provide me with a frame for this essay's contention that The Wind in the Willows can be read as Kenneth Grahame's attempt to distance himself from the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement with which he had once been identified. For the book that begins and ends with acts of house-cleaning undertaken by Grahame's band of male friends tries to domesticate Walter Pater's and Oscar Wilde's more extravagant versions of "The House Beautiful."1 Begun in 1906, The Wind in the Willows appeared in 1908, a bare three years after the posthumous publication of De Profundis and in the same year in which Robert Ross brought out a fourteen-volume edition of Oscar Wilde's Complete Works. [End Page 1] Grahame's lyric exaltation of the benign pastoral haven shared by Mole, Rat, and Badger is in keeping with his much earlier insistence, in his 1893 Pagan Papers, that it was "good to get back" to unencumbered and "sequestered" natural sites (Pagan Papers 23, 28). The comic mis-adventures of Mr. Toad, the garrulous speedster who is thrown into jail for his social transgressions and whose ancestral Hall becomes possessed by the anarchic inhabitants of the Wild Wood, now act as a foil to the wholesomeness of a reclusive life that features a de-eroticized male bonding. Unlike his more decorous animal friends, the attention-seeking Mr. Toad is childishly uninhibited. As I will try to show, Toad bears more than the casual resemblances to Oscar Wilde that both Seth Lerer and Annie Gauger have noted in their recent annotated editions of The Wind in the Willows.2 Still, Grahame's mockery of a cigar-smoking Toad he dresses in drag is not his only means to signal a retreat from the excesses of the 1890s. As I will show at the end of this article, even the most reliable of the river-bank's band of male friends, Water Rat, must be drained of any proclivity for untrustworthy Wildean "passions." The pastoral river bank that acts as the prime setting for The Wind in the Willows is a version of the landscape to which Kenneth Grahame and his motherless siblings were transported when he was but five years old. In 1906, two years before the book's publication, Grahame resettled in Cookham Dene in Berkshire after more than thirty years of life in London. The river-islands, weirs, and backwaters where an imaginative child had once watched otters, moles, water-rats—and toads—were now revisited in a sort of Wordsworthian return. Yet this river-world also contained a very different memorial. As Peter Green notes in his fine Grahame biography, Cookham Dene was "almost in sight of Reading Gaol," a prison bordered by the Thames marshes (Green 284). As the site of Oscar Wilde's incarceration and literary recantations, Reading Gaol must...

De Meyer at Vogue: Commercializing Queer Affect in First World War-era Fashion Photography

This article analyzes the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, a pictorialist whose work revolutionized fashion photography at Vogue between 1913 and 1922. After a brief discussion of de Meyer's life and work in Europe before emigrating to New York City in 1914, the essay draws on recent scholarship on “public feelings” to investigate the queer context of de Meyer's photographic work for US Vogue in the years surrounding the First World War. The essay argues that de Meyer brought to Vogue a specific Edwardian structure of feeling defined by a revolt against the rationality of the second industrial revolution and informed by a transatlantic aesthetic movement that privileged emotional life and expression. De Meyer brought together the aesthetic movement with a queer transatlantic counterculture whose style, borrowing from José Muñoz, can be characterized by “affective excess.” De Meyer's collaborator in several of the Vogue essays was the mannequin and Ziegfeld model-showgirl Dolores, who complemented de Meyer's camp excessiveness with her signature laconic performance of white affect. In the context of US race politics and commercial culture in the First World War era, de Meyer's queer aesthetic was also a racial project that played a central role in the commercialization of aesthetic feeling.

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy. The Making of GKC 1874-1908. By William Oddie.

William Oddie’s highly readable ‘intellectual biography’, which makes full use of the Chesterton papers in the British Library, covers what he sees as the important half of the writer’s life, and is as much a spiritual as an intellectual biography, since the thesis is that by the time of Orthodoxy (from which the title is taken) in 1908, Chesterton’s role as a (Roman) Catholic apologist was pretty well settled, although he did not actually join the Church until 1922. Oddie argues, too, that Chesterton’s anti-modernism emerged separately from his move towards Christianity. The biography charts Chesterton’s development from his earliest writings (or rather, dictation, at the age of three), through his schooldays, a period of depression while he was technically a student at the Slade, his rejection of the aesthetic movement, down to his gradual rise to literary fame. Oddie is careful to show us how words like ‘heresy’, ‘orthodoxy’, ‘patriotism’, ‘anarchy’ and ‘imperialism’ are used, and he is rightly circumspect (as indeed was Chesterton himself) in assessing the value of influences, especially early ones. Thus, we are presented with a whole range of positives and negatives; on the positive side are George MacDonald (notably the Curdie stories), Walt Whitman (in Ernest Rhys’s expurgated edition), the lectures of W. P. Ker, the nonsense-verse of W. S. Gilbert; on the negative, first Wilde and the aesthetes (with The Picture of Dorian Gray taken as glorifying the pleasure ideal), and later on the rationalists. Of course, with Chesterton things were never straightforward, and while his opposition to the notion of art without a moral, and to many attendant aspects of what he typified as the ‘green carnation’ movement (he was very clearly against homosexuality), he will have been aware precisely of the ambiguity about Wilde’s novel (which was initially praised by a review in the Church Leader precisely for its moral), and as Oddie points out, his final comments on Wilde himself were not entirely negative. Reference to the protean nature of GKC (are his initials nowadays as readily recognised as they were, or as those of his friend and sparring partner GBS?) highlights another problem at the heart of any study of Chesterton.

The Liquefaction of Desire: Music, Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour. Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual (review)

Reviewed by: Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual Rebecka Rutledge Fisher Reid-Pharr, Robert. Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 184 pp. $20.00 paper. In Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual, Robert Reid-Pharr takes as his premise a fundamental ambiguity in race and ethnicity studies–namely, the fact that race is constructed, on the one hand, through social discourses that are external to the African American community, and on the other by ideas associated with these discourses that are, paradoxically, promulgated within this community. With this in mind, he makes a distinction between two types of thinkers. There are [End Page 273] those who are chosen, who submit to the Fanonian gaze or the Althusserian command and thus burden themselves with the racial epidermal schema Frantz Fanon describes with such eloquence in Black Skin, White Masks. And there are those who choose, who refuse to bend to the laws of racial and sexual essentialism and instead practice polysemic reasoning in determining their identities. Those who are chosen (I will call them traditionalists) are readily accused of being misologists: they do not recognize in the specificity of racial identity to which they cling the sea of humanity in which they thought they had immersed themselves. Those who choose are the embodiment of partiality; they have chosen to inhabit a “queer space” that privileges “the radically antitraditionalist aesthetic that fuels this study” (7). I shall call them the exemplars. That the exemplars represent something other than that which is ideal is clear. Their performance of identity is quintessential, but only in that they perform identity–racial, sexual identity–differentially. This is what Reid-Pharr expresses when, in the autobiographical voice that wends through this scholarly study of choice and desire, he self-identifies as a “young man of color” who “believes that his role is to confront his readers with the reality of their freedom” (7): [My] challenge to those who would suggest that the weight of history disallows any efficacious manipulation of the cultural and ideological apparatuses that underwrite so-called racial distinction is to suggest that their contention that they cannot or will not choose is, in fact, an affirmation of the racial status quo. (8) With this provocative pronouncement, Reid-Pharr turns his attention to the erosion of innocence he sees proclaimed and depicted in the literature of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, in photographs of the Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, and in Melvin Van Peebles’s blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. He admits that the anatomy of desire he sketches looks very much like an Old (Black) Boy’s network of representative men. No black women thinkers–traditionalist or otherwise–figure prominently in Reid-Pharr’s slim study, though they are, at least, present. The main objects of Reid-Pharr’s intellectual desire are black male intellectuals whom he paints as ancestors of his own erudition. Reid-Pharr’s mode of inquiry sets up a masculine genealogy meant to counter the misapprehension of today’s students of literature who mistakenly “reproduce notions of a stagnant Black American history by insisting that the anguished cries of the slave are ultimately indistinct from the complicated musings of the contemporary artist” (37). There is, however, a problem with this articulation of intent. Reid-Pharr’s book does not, in fact, treat the contemporary artist, at least not the artist contemporary to the twenty-first century. His attention is halted in the 1970s at the height of the black power movement, when articulations of what black is and what black “ain’t” were ruled by the structuralist impulses of the Black Aesthetic movement. Richard Wright is the modern father of this movement, the “funny father”–in Reid-Pharr’s critical language, the “funny” intellectual is at once a precocious analogue and an effect of the idea of the “queer” intellectual–whose genius was, in part, “his ability to map narratives of intellectual celebrity in such a way that the presumably ‘queer’ aspects of his personality, those many parts of his persona that encroached upon ‘sexual...

Introduction: Modernism at Night

Is Queer modernism simply another name for modernism?As Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz note in their introduction to the 2006 collection Bad Modernisms, “[T]here were numerous ways of being outside in the early twentieth century” (7). Efforts over the past several decades to imagine modernism as an expanded field have been remarkably successful. Female modernism, African American modernism, queer modernism, sentimental modernism, low- and middlebrow modernism, and colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial modernism have all been integrated into a renewed understanding of modernism (or modernisms, as it is often written). In addition, the rethinking of modernism as a set of aesthetic movements in relation to a larger context of global modernity and modernization has turned the inside out. Since few modernists, on closer inspection, appear to have stayed high or dry, bad modernism, outsider modernism, and marginal modernism begin to look more and more like modernism itself.

Art and Life in Aestheticism (review)

Reviewed by: Art and Life in Aestheticism Mary Ann Frese Witt Kelly Comfort, ed. Art and Life in Aestheticism New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008, 240 pp. Questions concerning both the definition and the value of aestheticism, as well as discussion of its chronological parameters, are central to the wide-ranging essays in this volume. Reflections on “de-humanizing” and “re-humanizing” within aesthetic movements give the volume a thematic unity. In her comprehensive introduction, Kelly Comfort draws on Ortega y Gasset’s famous formulation of the “dehumanization of art” as well as on Theodore Adorno and Peter Bürger to sketch out a theory of de-humanization as, among other things, “the drive to free art from human utility or usefulness (4)” and re-humanization as the subjective experience of engagement with art. The last essay in the book, Ben De Bruyn’s “Art for Heart’s Sake,” analyzing a trend from Kierkegaard through Pater through Iser, perhaps charts most clearly the trajectory from de-humanizing to re-humanizing, viewed in terms of relations between aesthetics and ethics. Grouped more or less chronologically, the essays deal with nineteenth-century aesthetes or adherents to the doctrine of l’art pour l’art such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Rosetti; turn-of-the-century figures including Pater, Wilde, Stefan George, and Nietzsche; modernist writers such as Joyce and Nabokov; and later twentieth-century theory in Adorno, Iser, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes. Robert Archambeau’s “The Aesthetic Anxiety” effectively compares surrealist poets from the 1920s to language poets of the 1970s around the question of each group’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to claim political significance for the pursuit of art for art’s sake. “True art,” André Breton claimed in 1925, “cannot be anything other than revolutionary” (150). It would have been of interest to mention that Italian fascists, around the same time, were making almost identical claims for the relevance of “true” (non-propagandistic) art to the revolution viewed from their end of the spectrum. Discussion of the relations of aesthetics and politics in Italian writers such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti would have been a useful addition to the book. Benjamin’s “aesthetics of politics,” mentioned several times, was after all originally a comment on Marinetti. The scope of the essays is nonetheless quite broad. Ileana Marin does a fine analysis of what she calls “aesthetically saturated readings” in the relations between Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poetic and painterly works. Margueritte Murphy also compares visual and verbal art in her consideration of Baudelaire’s “aesthetic of the bizarre.” Andrew Eastham convincingly elucidates the relationship between irony and the de-humanizing process of “aesthetic vampirism” in works by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Paul Fox’s perceptive reading of Huysman’s A Rebours highlights [End Page 178] the novel’s own reading of Dickens while arguing that it makes a statement on the power (rather than the isolation) of aesthetic imagination. Analyzing from the perspective of reception rather than from that of “pure” art, Yvonne Ivory shows the de-humanizing tendencies of the poets around Stefan George against the rehumanizing tendencies in Pater. In what he calls Nietzsche’s “physical aestheticism,” Karl Ashbaugh traces overlapping relations between art and nature as theorized in The Geneology of Morals and The Gay Science. In his essay on Adorno, Charles B. Sumner argues against any re-humanizing potential of l’art pour l’art or aestheticism, showing how Adorno valorizes ugliness and putrefaction against the cult of impassive beauty. Sarah Garland, on the other hand, in an interesting comparison of Sontag and Barthes, demonstrates the continued vitality of aestheticism in the works of the two mid-century writers, arguing with considerable subtlety that the undermining of the “natural” or the mimetic is not necessarily de-humanizing. The most readable of the essays is undoubtedly that of Gene Bell-Villada, who abandons the usual academic prose style for a vivid personal narrative of his own engagement with American aesthetics during the cold war and with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. Bell-Villada gives a fascinating account of aestheticism in the works of American modernist writers, abstract expressionist painters, and new critics in relation to anti...

Ethnic Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnic Modernism Henry Veggian Ethnic Modernism. By Werner Sollors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2008. Werner Sollors has cultivated a distinctive habit of sculpting new arguments from rutted and well-traveled key words. "Descent," "consent," ethnicity," and "thematic criticism" are certainly not his creations but Sollors has often reconfigured them like an urban planner who makes a familiar place appear as a newly invented city. Indeed, his explanation of the term "invention" in the 1989 essay "The Invention of Ethnicity" is exemplary of this habit, which results from the pedestrian finesse of Sollors's prose: its arrangements are direct yet fluid, its vocabulary repetitious yet heterodox, and its arguments explore tangents of familiar themes that were forgotten or dismissed. Ethnic Modernism attempts to do for "modernism" what Sollors has done for those previously cited keywords. What is most interesting about this particular example is that Sollors's must consider the term in relation to his own prior writings on it. The words "modern," modernity," and "modernism" recur often in Sollors's early works, where they rarely synonymous. For example, the subtitle of his first monograph, published in 1978 with the title Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," invoked the Symbolist tradition of using the poor, the ethnic, the racial underclass as its subject. In that work Sollors represented Jones/Baraka as a "black Baudelaire" using modernist literary technique to engage matters of racial identity. The book oriented Sollors's career towards what he then rightly considered to be an undervalued relationship between modernist aesthetics and sociological categories of ethnicity and race. Over several decades of writing, the former came to trouble the latter. While explaining the term "ethnicity" in a later essay, Sollors distinguished between a medieval "ethnic" past and modernist dissociation from it. More recently, Sollors stressed in an introduction to Dumas' novel Georges that unlike Dumas' contemporary readers, "modern" readers would require footnotes to explain certain 19th century allusions. Time, subjectivity, irony, society, interpretation, reception: each seems to inflect "modernism" in a different way. They also conflict with one another, leaving many questions unresolved. Was modernism an [End Page 118] anti-ethnic and anti-racial force? Had modernism disrupted the recovery of ethnic history or made it possible? Ethnic Modernism engages the opportunity to follow these matters which had come to resemble traffic jams. There is a powerful dynamic at work in the title Ethnic Modernism insofar as the first term represents the principal avenue of his career and the second resembles an unpaved and neglected side street. Beginning with the book's introductory essay, Sollors stresses the simple but important distinction between the standard definition of modernity as "sociological and technological developments" and the "aesthetic movements" of modernism. (10) This distinction does not aim to merely invert cause (modernity) and effect (modernism); rather, Sollors uses examples of mass transit to connect the chapters, forming a grid, as it were, of recurring and interlocking points. The book's narrative will often turn on these points and move the work in a new direction. The setting is a large city. It is any and every city. Stein's Lena rides hopelessly on a streetcar, Saroyan's narrator observes morbid subway faces. In a short sketch by Mary Antin a streetcar conductor scolds two littering Italian children. Faulkner's narration in The Sound and the Fury becomes a "stream of consciousness trolley" (122) and "transport" becomes a trope for the neo-mystical modernism of Jean Toomer's prose. The examples are pervasive. Henry Roth, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, and Leo Szilard are also invoked, to name only a few of the ethnic modernists who turned the "streetcar settings" of modernity into aesthetic boundary-crossing. But where the aesthetics of an early ethnic modernism hoped that modernity could be turned against itself, the technologies of modernity eventually prevail by reinforcing segregation, internment, and imprisonment. It is truly a binary relationship, in the literal sense of the word, which means a pair of railway tracks, on which pre-WWI modernism and modernity travel towards an eventual Cold War collision. The book's second chapter concludes with Sollors's assessment that Gertrude Stein "had set up a model...

Las piruetas y su aplicación en diferentes disciplinas deportivas

El propósito de este estudio es realizar una revisión bibliográfica del término pirueta y sus diferentes acepciones en algunas disciplinas artístico-deportivas. Profundizaremos en la terminología, definición y clasificación del elemento pirueta, examinando las diferencias que existen en su ejecución en las diferentes disciplinas deportivas analizadas (Gimnasia Rítmica, Gimnasia Artística, Patinaje Artístico y Natación Sincronizada). Dichas disciplinas están relacionadas con el mundo del arte, el baile y la música; es por esto que en ellas se realiza uno de los movimientos más bellos y estéticos que recibe el nombre de pirueta. Igualmente en este trabajo se proponen ejercicios para la mejora de la ejecución técnica de la pirueta.

<em>Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914</em>, by Ruth Livesey

Reviewed by: Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 Talia Schaffer (bio) Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914, by Ruth Livesey; pp. viii + 236. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007, £30.00, $60.00. Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 is a remarkably knowledgeable study of the varieties of British socialism at the turn of the century. Ruth Livesey draws on her expertise about the personalities, philosophies, affiliations, and influences of the movement to map out complicated interrelations of rival groups. In so doing, she persuasively suggests a new reading of British socialist aesthetics. Livesey points out that William Morris "has long proven troublesome to those seeking to place him in the history of the aesthetic movement and the rise of modernism" (20). But for Livesey, Morris is a crucial point of origin for important strains of socialism, aestheticism, and modernism between 1880 and 1914. She shows that his dream of a collectivist, ethical, labor-rich environment for art production was deeply empowering, particularly for women like Clementina Black, Olive Schreiner, and Dollie Radford. Another group, however, followed the Kantian ideal of a disinterested, autonomous art. The autonomous school eventually abandoned social labor (as Livesey shows by tracing the careers of Alfred Orage and Virginia Woolf). Meanwhile, the ethical, female-friendly, fellowship/ guild socialism derived from Morris underwent various permutations, including attempts by Edward Carpenter and G. B. Shaw to improve virile bodies through discipline of dress and diet, and the prewar neo-pagan practices of Rupert Brooke and his circle. In the 1880s, it seemed, one could have it all: socialist revolution and art and a new lifestyle. But this fragile balance increasingly splintered into opposing groups. After 1910, autonomous art ruled the modernist realm. After an excellent brief introduction providing crisp thumbnail definitions of the various movements the book tackles, Livesey offers an explication of Morris's brand of socialism, rooted in ethical, communitarian, masculine labor, as contrasted with the alternative: Paterian and Wildean individualism and cultivation of the artistic sensibility. Among those who tried to live out Morris's ideal of fellowship were several important women. Livesey explains why Black found Morrisian socialism conducive to her cause of insisting on the value of women's labor (including her own). As Livesey shows in her second chapter, however, Black had to battle not only prurient speculation about her "real" (romantic) motives but also the aestheticizing perspective that scanned her work only for prettiness. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Schreiner similarly enjoyed the Morrisian idea of communalism and the way it accommodated a poetic, artistic particularism. "Paradoxical though it may seem," Livesey explains, "Morris's equation of the artist with the productive virile man provided a means for middle-class women artists to insert themselves into a history of productivity and engaged social action" (101). Somewhat differently, as Livesey explains in chapter 5, Radford explored the tension between the individualist ethos of feminized taste (the Oscar Wilde lineage) [End Page 525] and the socialist ethos of manly labor (the Morris heritage), seeking the best home for her own affective, feminized, lyrical tradition. If these chapters show how female fin-de-siècle reformers enjoyed Morris's space of possibility, it is chapter 4 that provides a refreshing comic interlude as it turns to the men. Livesey explains the appeal of "faddish" socialism. The religion of socialism meant idealist bodily behavior: vegetarianism, homemade sandals, Jaeger woollens, the simple life. Morris's stress on labor licensed both Carpenter and Shaw, in different ways, to imagine that proper dress and diet would generate the virile male body of the future. Perhaps less amusing and more dismaying is Orage's take on the socialist legacy in chapter 6. Famous as the editor of the modernist journal The New Age, Orage leavened its aesthetic pronouncements with Nietzschean heroic individualism, opposing the "effeminate decadence" of ethical socialism (165), which he disdained as sentimental and feminized. Finally, in chapter 7, Livesey offers a brilliantly elegant reading of Woolf. She contrasts the mature Woolf against her own younger socialist self, her husband, her friend Roger Fry, and her...

Être et paraître dans Miss Brown De Vernon Lee

In her first novel Miss Brown (1884), Vernon Lee painted a critical picture of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and the Aesthetic circle. She critiqued the ideological underpinnings of the Aesthetic movement, analyzing in particular how the supposedly disinterested artistic creed of art for art’s sake often consisted in intellectualizing and repressing reality by objectifying the body in all its forms. Through the description of the career of Anne Brown, this anti-Bildungsroman particularly exposed the social, political, intellectual and sexual exploitation of female models and muses.

JAMES AND THE AESTHETES

The thumbnail version of the relationship between James and Wilde is that James did not take to Wilde, thinking him fatuous, immature, exploitative, opportunistic, manipulative and shallow as an artist, and once the scandal broke attempted to put some distance between himself and the pilloried aesthete, because he was sufficiently aware of things to realise that he was in danger, as someone with homosexual tendencies, of becoming a similar victim to society's vindictiveness and intolerance. Mendelssohn does not completely overthrow this broad and simple account, but modifies it considerably, and explores the relationship in great detail. What emerges from her dense and careful study is that James and Wilde, as they developed artistically, were continually modifying and adjusting themselves in relation to the concerns and practices of the other, and in so doing provide a model for the conflicting strains in the aesthetic movement. Mendelssohn presents a fairer, more even-handed, subtler and completer picture than I would have done, since my own attitude to Wilde is briefly summarised in a piece, in The Wildean of all places (January 2002), which assumes that aestheticism is a bad thing, and that virtually no decent artists or writers would wish to be thought of as such.

Art for art's sake: aestheticism in Victorian painting

In the London circles of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic Leighton, the notion of for art's became a shared concern: if art is not created for the sake of preaching a moral lesson, or supporting a political cause, or making a fortune, or any other objective, what might art be? Art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn traces the emergence of the debates over this issue in the 1860s and 1870s, focusing especially on the Rossetti, Whistler, Leighton, and other protagonists of the Aesthetic Movement and their paintings--some of the most haunting and memorable images in modern art. The English painters' search for the formula to best express the idea of for art's was a unified and powerful artistic undertaking, Prettejohn demonstrates, and the Aesthetic Movement made important contributions to the history of modern art.

William Morris, Print Culture, and the Politics of Aestheticism

William Morris, Print Culture, and the Politics of Aestheticism Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) When we consider late-Victorian literature through the lens of the Aesthetic Movement, what do we do with William Morris? Is he the nostalgic neo-medievalist, the “idle singer of an empty day,” or is he the socialist artist par excellence who, after his 1883 adoption of socialism, forged what Caroline Arscott has called “the first English-language attempt to produce a Marxist theory of art”?1 We can appeal to chronology to answer this question: the early Morris was a Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthete, whose work deeply influenced Oscar Wilde’s articulation of “The House Beautiful” and “The Decorative Arts” on his lecture tour of America, while the later Morris was a radical who spent the last thirteen years of his life formulating a new kind of political aesthetic. But such a distinction ignores the continuities between his early and late career and fails to address the underlying question of whether Aestheticism and revolutionary socialism are indeed oppositional. If Aestheticism is defined conventionally by its insistence on the autonomy of art and the isolation of individual consciousness—“each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of the world,” as Walter Pater put it—and, consequently, by inwardness, reflexivity, and detachment from socio-political reality, was Morris its adversary or unwitting proponent?2 Was he a socialist trapped in the Aesthetic age, or an Aesthete mired down in socialist propaganda? A theory of Morris’s place within Aestheticism, and, more broadly, of the place of the political within Aestheticism, can be derived by considering Morris’s response to fin de siècle print culture and his two major experiments in socialist print: the Commonweal newspaper and the Kelmscott Press. These two print [End Page 477] projects formally mirror the genres of Aestheticism and utopianism in their conception of the text’s relation to political reality. Using Fredric Jameson’s recent work on the politics of Utopia, I want to suggest that Morris’s print ventures, the Commonweal and Kelmscott, construct themselves in relation to mainstream print in the same way that Utopia constructs itself in relation to present-day reality, and that both of these relationships echo Aesthetic theories of art and realism. Recognizing these parallels reframes the debate over Aestheticism’s politics—and over Morris’s politics—more properly as a debate over evolutionary versus revolutionary socialism, over reformist versus revolutionary approaches to political change, and over progressive versus dialectical theories of history. Positioning Morris and Aestheticism within the fin de siècle political moment, a moment riven by these very debates, allows us to identify the operative conceptions of the political and the aesthetic that they share, and the utopian and revolutionary features of Aesthetic form. Morris, Print, and Utopia Morris’s print ventures in the 1880s and 1890s investigate the nature of print’s politics, expose and critique the political effects of mass print culture, and assert the possibility of a break from the foreseeable future of politics and print. They are situated at the intersection of idealist, Marxist, Aesthetic, and modernist discourses; conceptualized in these terms, contradictory elements of these projects mirror the variegated aesthetic landscape of the fin de siècle, a milieu newly complicated by critics such as Ann Ardis, who argues that the “competition among emergent aesthetic and political traditions in turn-of-the-century Britain,” “the quarreling as well as the voracious borrowing of ideas,” requires “a much more detailed and nuanced topographical mapping of the period.”3 In a piece that exemplifies Ardis’s vision, Toril Moi has recently excavated the aesthetic category of “idealism”—“the belief that the task of art . . . is to uplift us, to point the way to the Ideal”—and argues that its lingering resonance in the late-nineteenth century has been suppressed by modernist suspicion of idealist art.4 Her recovery of idealism as a significant aesthetic and political discourse in this era bears strongly on studies of Morris, whose work exhibits features of both an older idealist tradition and an emerging modernist one, as well as on studies of Aestheticism, a movement that opposed the idealist conflation of beauty and...

Fast Books Read Slow: The Shapes of Speed in Manhattan Transfer and The Sun Also Rises

F. T. Marinetti, founder of the Italian Futurist movement, programmatically declared in 1909 that, because it must yoke the period’s unprecedented speed technologies for aesthetic purposes, modern art “can only be violence, cruelty, and injustice” (Marinetti 13). In 1915, Marinetti extended this imperative to humanity itself: “one must prepare,” he insisted, “for the imminent and inevitable identification of man with motor” (256). Based on such pronouncements, a considerable body of scholarship has taught us that early 20th-century speed technologies are historically imbricated with violence; that modernist aesthetic movements, like Futurism, fueled this relationship; and that subjectivity is at stake when a culture accelerates beyond the ability to stop.2 Foremost among such scholarship, Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space (1986) and Paul Virilio’s

Politicizing Dance in Late-Victorian Women's Poetry

As she sought to differentiate herself from her traditionally counterparts, the New Woman interrogated and challenged her role within established social institutions. Calling for the reform of ideas about education, property ownership, and dress--to name just a few--the late-Victorian feminist defined herself as she redefined the culture. Writers who embraced such ideas used novels, essays, and poetry to advance the political agenda of the New Woman, question the institution of marriage, and promote transgressive sexualities. Recent recovery efforts have brought a body of work by writers such as Ella Hepworth Dixon, Mona Caird, George Paston, and Sarah Grand, among many others, back into circulation, providing scholars and students a new point of entry into the literature and culture of the fin-de-siecle. the novels and essays of the New Woman are often recognizable for their heightened social consciousness and clear political stance, her poetry is more difficult to identify. Indeed, characterizing New Woman poets or New Woman poetry is a vexed undertaking, complicated by the nature of the genre and the influence of aestheticism, as Linda K. Hughes explains in her Introduction to New Woman Poets: An Anthology: While aestheticism and New Woman writing were not mutually exclusive, the latter was often an intermittent stance within the encompassing category of writing by female aesthetes whose work not hitherto been memorable chiefly for its feminist activism. (1) The influence of the New Woman phenomenon, Hughes notes, may appear in individual poems rather than characterize an entire volume or body of work. This complex relationship between the New Woman and aestheticism has been articulated by Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades in their Introduction to Women and British Aestheticism, in which they discuss how critical attention to the New Woman has not necessarily accommodated the work of female aesthetes, focusing instead on those writers strong feminist or political credentials. (2) In characterizing the aesthetic movement Schaffer and Psomiades cite the interest in fields traditionally assigned to the women's sphere--including fashion, interior design, and decorative art (p. 1). To this list, I would add dance as both a feminine accomplishment and theatrical performance that attracted male and female aesthetic poets. Yet, for women poets in particular, writing about dance allowed them to engage with aesthetic ideals while using their poetry to promote the political ideals associated with the New Woman. Despite changing conceptions of gender roles and sexuality at the fin-de-siecle, in certain arenas, pushing women onto the path from virginal courtship, to heterosexual marriage, to domestic bliss remained the status quo. The ballroom of the 1880s and 1890s was one such arena; here, couplings and courtships prevailed. For example, in her manual The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894), Edna Witherspoon provides an illustration of polite behavior that shows how women were denied agency in the ballroom: Gentlemen are expected to ask for introductions if they are not acquainted with ladies who are without partners for dances, and at a private ball a lady is not justified in refusing to dance with any gentleman who is introduced for this purpose, unless she has most justifiable grounds for so doing. (3) Women are, essentially, at the mercy of any potential suitor, and they are continually thrust into a series of partnerships--the body is forced to act, despite the wishes of the mind and heart. Predictably, when the ballroom appears in poetry and prose by women writers, its strict rules of etiquette and gender politics are often criticized and questioned; nonetheless, these writers remain aware of the liberatory powers of the act of dancing itself. An examination of the function of dance in poems by Amy Levy, Katharine Tynan, and A. Mary F. Robinson reveals the strategies through which late-Victorian woman writers revised women's experience of dancing while challenging the established practices of the Victorian ballroom. …

Feminism, Theatre Criticism, and the Modern Drama

"Feminism, Theatre Criticism, and the Modern Drama": The paper examines theatre criticism in the Edwardian feminist press to reveal the connections feminist reviewers were making between the plays of the period and the wider social and political reforms they were campaigning for. Examples are drawn from suffrage newspapers and feminist reviews and include commentaries on leading modern male dramatists such as Ibsen and Shaw, coverage of lesser-known women playwrights, as well as reflections on general issues related to dramatic literature and theatrical production in the period. As contributors to feminist periodicals, journalists, writers/playwrights, actresses, and activists were conscious of themselves as "modern" and "advanced" women implicated in and benefiting from the changes taking place in all spheres of life. Their concerns, in relation to the arts, were more often with innovation at the level of ideas and attitudes, rather than with formal experiments. As part of a larger exploration of the issues related to staging modernism, this paper calls into question the relevance of modernism as a critical paradigm in relation to both feminism and theatre/drama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By elaborating the problems with what Rita Felski terms the "symptomatic confusion of a historical period (modernity) with an artistic movement (modernism)" the paper argues that these attempts to mediate culture from a feminist perspective are better understood in the context of the relationship between feminism and modernity (women's experience of the social and political changes associated with the early twentieth century) than in the context of high modernism as an avant-garde aesthetic movement. In the process, the paper outlines the limits of modernist studies as a field of enquiry and of modernist definitions of what was considered new, innovative, and relevant at the time.

The Beautiful but Strong Message of the Green Butterfly

The objective of this draping project was to recreate the aesthetic movement of a butterfly in flight and to emphasize environmental harmony. The resources and materials used are important to issues of the environment. Even though the green butterfly dress is very beautiful, it sends a strong message about risk to nature and the environment. The dress focuses on creating the movement of wings, like those of a butterfly in flight, when the wearer walks in it. The skirt makes a lovely wave, like a butterfly in a fresh and open green field. Overall, the figure presents an hourglass silhouette with a fitted upper body, narrow waist, and gradually flared full skirt.

The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion and the Question of “Right Life”

The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion and the Question of “Right Life” Adam Arola When confronted with subcultures that understand themselves to be rebellious and define themselves around a particular aesthetic movement, anyone who has spent time reading Adorno cannot but find him- or herself confronted with a particular array of questions and concerns: Can any kind of potent, critical labor be actualized by an aesthetic movement that does not attend to the material conditions of its emergence? Furthermore, do all attempts at rebellion necessarily fall into the trap of replicating the patterns of social life against which they are reacting? Finally, do all “failed” attempts at rebellion necessarily amount to precisely that, exhaustive failures? Are we in fact, as Ian MacKaye put it in 1982, just screaming at a wall—but a wall that will never fall? Or might there be a certain kind of rebellion through art—in this case, certain varieties of punk rock—that, as Adorno says, “is true insofar as what is speaking out of it and it itself is conflicting and unreconciled” (1997, 168)? In other words, is there a kind of failed attempt at rebellion that, in recognizing the necessity of its failure, simultaneously serves as an exposé of certain ideological overdetermination and frees us up for thinking anew? And what might this thinking otherwise look like? In light of these concerns, the objective of this essay is to investigate the relationship between a model autonomous subjectivity, the certain trope of authenticity, and social movements—particularly the culture that surrounds punk rock—that posit and understand themselves as rebellious. To that end, this article will take place in four sections. First, I discuss the connection between authenticity and punk rock, that is, punk rock’s critique of the “mainstream.” Second, I turn to investigate the model of individuality that lies as the subject of predication for the adjectives authentic or inauthentic—in doing so I hope to connect this model of the individual to a certain understanding of political sovereignty, the very model punk rock generally wants to reject. Third, I will show that this model of the individual is not only problematic but also untenable via a discussion of the problem with reactionary rebellion. Finally, through Adorno’s famous quote from Minima Moralia, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” that is, “There is no right life in a false life” (1980, 43), we will attempt to see what the limits of any critical [End Page 291] activity based in a reductive concept of authenticity might be. My claim is that insofar as punk rock reinstantiates the same pattern of life—that is, the falsehood or false life that Adorno points to in this aphorism—in its model of authenticity, its alleged subversions do nothing but reinforce what it is attempting to escape. That is to say, that insofar as subversive subcultures do nothing but replicate that which they are attempting to critique, they lack the possibility of authenticity thought robustly, because all possibility of propriety is lost. The generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity requires a transformation of the structure, what Adorno calls the constellation or force field, itself—not swapping which position one fills within it. This whole may be false, but we must wonder if all forms of life lead to such tyranny. My conclusion, tentatively stated, is no. I. “I’m More Punk than You” Let me begin the article with a quotation from Milan Kundera’s Immortality, which is to serve as our entryway into a discussion of the individual and authenticity. He writes: “In our world, where there are more and more faces, more and more alike, it is difficult for an individual to reinforce the originality of the self and to become convinced of its inimitable uniqueness. There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura’s method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more...

Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson

Reviewed by: Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Rebecca Stott (bio) Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson; pp. 282. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, £50.00, $90.00. In 1854 Thomas Huxley began a savage review of the still anonymously authored tenth edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) with a line from Macbeth: "time was, that when the brain was out the man would die," implying, of course, that the "pretentious nonsense" espoused by the book should have been long dead. Huxley was especially creative and effective in his use of Shakespeare to disparage his opponents. Literature was part of his armoury as well as part of his theatrical, rhetorical effects. Gowan Dawson's book shows us again and again that Huxley was not alone in his use of literary allusion as gunfire and cannon-shot. The history of what one 1871 contributor to the Edinburgh Review described as the "storm of mingled wrath, wonder and admiration" created by Darwinism has been scrupulously documented. Books on the reception of Darwinism and its assimilation and transformation into various cultural forms now fill shelf after shelf of the history of science sections of great libraries. This makes it all the more remarkable that the terrain chosen by Dawson in Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability constitutes a dark and fascinating corner in the Darwin industry, one that is dimly lit if not unlit. Dawson begins by examining the widely accepted claim that Darwinism, unlike some previous incarnations of transmutation, depended for its acceptance on the impeccable respectability of its principle exponents. Dawson doesn't challenge this claim, but rather sheds new light on the great struggle that took place to establish and maintain that respectability. He documents the long-running campaigns to discredit Darwinism and other forms of materialism mobilised by a wide range of opponents, drawing on a broad range of sources including journalism, scientific books and lectures, sermons, radical pamphlets, aesthetic and comic verse, and even pornography. Dawson reads the reception of Darwinism—and scientific naturalism more broadly, including the work of John Tyndall and W. K. Clifford—in new and interesting ways. He is concerned with strategies and boundaries, with the fashioning not of individuals but of intellectual respectability and its obverse. He asks about the strategies of Darwin's opponents: how did they seek to discredit these big and bold new ideas? Which methods of discrediting [End Page 339] worked and which didn't work? He follows these questions by looking at how the supporters of Darwinism played out their own strategies to realign their ideas with respectability. For the Victorian opponents of Darwinism, of course, it wasn't enough to say Darwinism heretically challenged the Biblical record. To be certain of the mud sticking, Darwinism's opponents worked hard to associate it with an additional range of seriously disreputable ideas: paganism, promiscuous and unrestrained sexuality, and all things French. A. C. Swinburne and later the poets of the aesthetic movement proved especially useful for their associations with all three: Dawson shows us reviewers, essayists, and lecturers repeatedly disparaging scientific naturalism, materialism, and Darwinism by association with Swinburne and aestheticism. Dawson also reveals the efforts of Darwinists to uncouple Darwinism and scientific naturalism from the transgressive excesses of aesthetic literature and art. In making this case, Dawson advances two other significant arguments. First, he challenges uncritically celebratory readings of the discursive interchanges between literature and science (informed by Robert M. Young's schema of the loss of an erstwhile "common context" brought about by the increasing specialisation of science) by showing that not all such alignments and interchanges were creative and mutually beneficial: literature could be used to discredit science and science to discredit literature. Secondly Dawson claims that "from the late 1860s attention shifted increasingly from general concerns with political propriety to specific anxieties over sexual respectability, and it was actually Darwin's surprisingly recurrent connection with sexual immorality . . . which emerged as perhaps the most significant impediment to establishing a naturalistic worldview as a morally acceptable alternative to earlier theological outlooks. These iniquitous associations, moreover, would prove remarkably difficult to shake off" (4). This branch of cultural history is an...