Joris-Karl Huysmans Research Articles

Literature of Exhaustion: Representations of Mental Fatigue in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s „Against Nature" and Wilkie Collins’s „The Woman in White"

A phenomenon known well before the onset of modern society, registered as a medical term not until the second half of the 19th century, when physiologists and psychologists inquired into physical and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive work as well as that which had no work-related etiology. Such condition of the severe mental fatigue which entailed deficiency of nerve-force was defined by American neurologist George M. Beard as neurasthenia. Taking into account scientific studies of enervation, the article examines some late 19th-century literary treatments of exhaustion in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to present them as peculiar, decontextualized cases of exhaustion for exhaustion’s sake.

Bureaucratic Modernity: Huysmans as “rond-de-cuir”

By bringing together Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novella À vau-l’eau, his short story “La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran” (1888), and his personal writing, I argue that bureaucratic labor produces an affective atmosphere of ennui and disgust that defines both Huysmans’s œuvre and how he and his contemporaries understand and represent modernity. As Huysmans’s work suggests, the repetition and perceived meaninglessness of bureaucratic writing produces emotional and physical effects on the body of the bureaucrat by delimiting the patterns of his daily life. In representing the feelings of ennui and disgust that emerge from these effects on his literary bureaucrats, and himself, Huysmans reveals a larger cultural anxiety over the role of bureaucracy in modern life and its implications for non-bureaucratic writing in the modern age. In particular, these anxieties play out in the rampant anti-fonctionnarisme and broader affective crisis, the shared pessimisme, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Against the Grain: The Poetics of Non-Normative Masculinity in Decadent French Literature. By Mathew Rickard

In this book, Mathew Rickard capably and enthusiastically studies ‘the literary representation of non-normative masculinity at a time when masculinity was perceived to be in crisis’ (p. 18). For Rickard, the fin-de-siècle masculinity crisis ‘ironically allowed greater representation of alternative behaviours and identities precisely due to the questioning of masculinity that was occurring’ (p. 18). Are there places and times when masculinity is not in crisis for someone? How are we to decide if one individual’s masculinity crisis is of wider consequence? Rickard, who situates his writers in the context of the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, concerns about depopulation, struggles for women’s emancipation, and a new sexological interest in ‘perversity’, wonders if masculinity is ‘inherently toxic’ or if ‘queerer, intersectional, even healthier forms of masculinity [can] flourish’ (p. 13). Do all non-normative forms of masculinity array themselves on the side of the queer? Is the queer always a ‘healthier’ or more progressive option? Rickard’s book joins a fascinating body of recent work addressing these difficult questions. Marlon B. Ross’s Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), for instance, is interesting to read in parallel with Rickard’s volume. At one point, Ross tellingly juxtaposes James Baldwin and Truman Capote. Baldwin is Ross’s exemplar of successful insurgency. Capote’s masculinity, for all its non-normative misfittedness, is one some might qualify as counter-insurgent. ‘Sissiness is manifested differently in different racial formations’, Ross suggests (Sissy Insurgencies, p. 29). Racial formations per se do not come up in Rickard’s study, but he mentions, for instance, ‘the intersection of class and masculinity’ (Against the Grain, p. 46). I might tend to surmise that at least one or two of the four figures Rickard studies fall mostly on the Capote side of things (non-normative masculinity being a privilege aligned with other social entitlements) rather than the Baldwin one, but perhaps Rickard would have a different view. Clusters of interrelated social variables specific to different socio-cultural contexts are crucial to the evaluation of any instance of non-normative masculinity. Forms of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ are themselves plural in most historical contexts. When Jean Lorrain and Joris-Karl Huysmans, from their very different social locations, engage with ‘masculinity’, are they engaging with the same thing? Are all people who exhibit non-normative masculinity ‘adversely affected by the laws of the Patriarchy’ (p. 11) to the same degree and in the same way? Rickard begins his demonstration with Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), exploring how ‘non-normative men can appropriate a hegemonic identity through engaging with literature’ (p. 60). He then examines how, in Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901), ‘the representation of witchcraft […] links to the presentation of non-normative masculinity through comparable engagement with marginal practices’ (p. 65). The third chapter studies Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) and La Tour d’amour (1899), and shows how in Rachilde’s work, a reconfigured masculinity can be found in both ‘passive’ men and some women. In a final chapter, on Octave Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire (1886), Rickard takes up the topic of impotence (literal and figurative, real and fictional) to probe what kind of an achievement textual (as well as real life) ‘masculine author(ity)’ might be (p. 170). Sometimes Rickard writes that things are ‘inherently queer’ (pp. 69, 119; my emphasis): occulture in the Lorrain chapter for instance, or, in Rachilde’s crafty hands, normative masculinity itself. I wonder if the materials Rickard so richly details for his readers might rather encourage us to think relationally, and to come to understand how not all stances that fail to be normative necessarily qualify as queer or insurgent or progressive.

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Intertextual practice in Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours

A rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans is understood on the scriptural and aesthetic level as the privileged place of discursive interactions and all forms of interculturality. Textuality only makes sense in the rapprochement of writing and reading, as well as in the deployment of pictorial and artistic discourse. Thus, we propose to study in this article this textual phenomenon from two relations of co-presence, namely, reference and quotation. Then, we will draw out its meanings, showing precisely in what way the intertextual practice would be for Joris-Karl Huysmans a quest at the same time spiritual, intellectual and artistic. Keywords: Intertextuality, Reference, quotation, des Esseintes, A rebours.

The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907, by Giles Whiteley

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 by Giles Whiteley Isobel Armstrong (bio) The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907, by Giles Whiteley; pp. xiv + 290. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, £85.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $29.95 paper. In The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907, Giles Whiteley provides a deeply researched and imaginative study of nineteenth-century spaces, with a virtuosic prologue that demonstrates the originality of his critical method. Whiteley follows Joris-Karl Huysmans's character Jean des Esseintes, from À rebours (1884), through the spaces of Paris, eating, shopping, loitering. Only it is not wholly Paris, as he shows: in Huysmans's text, Paris is elided with London, the Seine with the Thames, the Rue de Rivoli with the Thames Tunnel, the Boulevard d'Enfer with the Metropolitan Railway. Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas De Quincey, all reading and rereading one another, are conjured intertextually and collectively superimposed. This is not just a question of allusion, or even a metonymic slide. Whiteley deftly establishes an intimate relation between widely separated spaces in what we might loosely call a chiastic technique, by bringing them together and assimilating them so as to demonstrate their affinity and difference. Dickens's London and Huysmans's Paris resonate with and critique one another, as do the London of late Dickens and John Ruskin's Venice. This convergence, Whiteley claims, is what the figures under discussion in his book—Ruskin, Dickens, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James—achieve in order to explore the quintessential nineteenth-century space: the metropolitan. In his highly particularized readings, one space generates and mutually changes another. The prologue sets out what Whiteley sees as "a new kind of aesthetics of space" developing in the period, which he theorizes through Walter Benjamin's ideas of dream space and the phantasmagoria of the city, as well as Benjamin's signature poet, Charles Baudelaire, and other postmodern critics (15). It is a political and psychic space, shaped by modern capital. Henri Lefebvre's classic The Production of Space (1974) is central to the discussion, and his distinction between representational space and the representation of space is particularly important to Whiteley's study: des Esseintes, for instance, encounters that celebration of Napoleon, the imperial Arc de Triomphe, and seeks out maps and guides to London. Both the arch and maps are ideological objects, but the first is intentionally so, whereas maps and boundaries are not produced with deliberate intent to alter consciousness even when they do so. Through des Esseintes and his sensory life, Whiteley introduces the antithetical binary that shapes his book: Ruskin's distinction between Theoria and Aesthesis—that is, an opposition between an ethical and moral reading of space and its history, related to the realist tradition, and an account of space that is read through the sensoria. Through Aesthesis, metropolitan spaces act on both the body and language, understood through a Friedrich Schelling-like sensuous cognition and issuing in a release of the unconscious that manifests itself in a range of affects and images, from desire to melancholia and even madness. The category of Aesthesis implicitly extends and consolidates Benjamin's dream space. This Theoria/Aesthesis opposition is the dialogue of the book, but Aesthesis becomes the dominant voice. Ruskin initiates the discussion. His commitment to ethical reading is introduced through the famous attack on Whistler and consolidated by his understanding of a [End Page 358] "conceptive" truth (56). The deterministic psychological realism of the eye rigorously governs perception in a sublime Platonic account of the body: there is a morality of the body that becomes social morality. Ruskin read Venetian architecture through the moral order of its governing power, but Whiteley argues that Aesthesis frequently invades Ruskin's theoretic readings of Venice with the attraction and repulsion of Decadence and its erotics. London and the reterritorialized space of the modern railway finally invade Venice as the two spaces converge, calling out not a theoretic but an aesthetic response. And Ruskin's Venice haunts all subsequent writers. Dickens is another figure for whom there is a conflicting response to the...

Morbid Reason, or the Shadow of the Enlightenment

Unlike the commonplace understanding of the Enlightenment as the epistemological and ontological construction of a rationality that is necessarily devoid of passion, Enlightenment reason, this essay claims, not only cannot be divorced from the workings of passion, but is also, in effect, constituted by its passionate sources. In order to complicate and challenge the long-held, conventional dualism of reason and passion, I argue that nineteenth-century European aestheticism fashioned a new model of the reason-passion relationship, a pathological reason coupled with morbid passions. To investigate this problematic monistic attribute and its significance, I examine first the general structure, functions, and characteristics of Enlightenment reason and then discuss significant literary examples of aestheticist characters—Johannes of “The Seducer’s Diary” in Either/Or Part I written by Søren Kierkegaard; Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature; Lord Henry and Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—in terms of the new emergence of morbidly “passionate reason.” I also discuss the significance of a rare example of a literary critique of the morbid reason that had appeared on the other side of the North Atlantic in 1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance, The Scarlet Letter. My new reading of Hollingsworth, who is depicted by Hawthorne as the stereotypical mad scientist, is intended to shed new light on how Hawthorne critiques a pathological reason, coupled with morbid passions, as the necessary consequence of Enlightenment reason.

Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture ed. by Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore (review).

Reviewed by: Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture ed. by Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore Ian Miller (bio) Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore, eds. Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2018. xi + 276 pp. Hardcover, $159.99. These are exciting times for humanities scholars interested in the abdomen. Perhaps some scholars would consider the gut to be a curious, even niche, object of historical inquiry. I would disagree. Eating. Digesting. Defecating. All these bodily processes are intimately tied to our physical and emotional well-being. Understanding them can take us to the core of human experience, emotions, and existence—physical and mental. And taking the gut as a starting point can raise unexpected, but important, questions. Why, since the nineteenth century, has digestive health been discussed in relation to broader ideas of nationhood and national identity? For what reasons have ideas about gut health intersected with broader issues such as class, gender, and race? How did the rise of capitalist modernity change (western) humans' experiences of their gut? In recent decades, scientists have identified the gut as a bodily region swarming with communities of bacteria. Each of us has a unique microbiome that forms early in life. Enter the new medical sub-discipline of nutritional psychiatry, which seeks to comprehend how our gut health affects our moods, positively or negatively. These psychiatrists believe that a fuller grasp of the gut-brain axis will shed light on how our eating affects our feelings and elucidate links between gut health and disorders including depression and anxiety. A growing number of scholars beyond the sciences are illuminating the gut's modern history, including Elizabeth Williams, who has succinctly examined the history and science of appetite;1 James Whorton, who emphasizes the importance attached to the bowels in early twentieth-century America;2 and Christopher Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne, who have explored topics such as the history of fat.3 My own research approaches the stomach from a historical perspective, revealing its fundamental importance to past experiences of health and well-being.4 In recent years, emerging scholars such as Evelien Lemmens and Elsa Richardson have also taken a historical approach to the gut. Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore's essay collection, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture, is situated in this growing body of engaging interdisciplinary research, linking the science of gut health to the aforementioned issues of identity, nationhood, modernity, class, gender, and race. [End Page 187] The phrase "gut feeling" perfectly encapsulates the volume's thematic approach. Using diverse methodologies rooted primarily in literature and medical history, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health establishes decisively that the nineteenth century was a time of heightened concern about gut health and its implications for emotional well-being. As the editors explain, this was a period when a critical mass of doctors, psychiatrists, novelists, artists, ethnographers, politicians, and religious leaders all wrote extensively on the relation between digestive function (or, more often than not, "dysfunction") and the human emotions (1–2). This insight justifies an interdisciplinary approach that, despite its diversity, underpins a remarkably cohesive volume—the result of careful editing and an artful weaving together of key topics and themes. Many of this volume's contributors examine dietary science's burgeoning influence on literary works. In his opening chapter, Tripp Rebrovick investigates the impact of esteemed nutritional chemist Justus von Liebig on Walt Whitman's mid-century writings. Like many physicians and scientists, Whitman was enthralled by the workings of the digestive system and shared with them the view that indigestion was a "great American evil" that threatened the body politic (15). This coupling of digestive health with national identity provides a thread that runs throughout Gut Feeling and Digestion. In France, as with Britain and other countries, the abdomen became known as the "second brain"; its disorders constituted a national threat. These interwoven concerns also featured in the writing of Émile Zola, as explored in chapters by Bertrand Marquer, Anne Vila, and Manon Mathias. Joris-Karl Huysmans's handling of digestion is discussed in contributions by Mathias and...

Domesticating Decadence: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Louÿs, and Their Invisible English Translators

AbstractDecadence eludes definition, but critics tend to concur on the movement’s transgressive and uncommercial status in the British literary field. This essay questions those associations by exploring a current of archetypal decadent French novels translated by and marketed to a mainstream Anglophone audience: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s En Route (1895, trans. 1896) and La cathédrale (1898, trans. 1898) and Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite: Mœurs antiques (1896, trans. 1900 and 1906) and La femme et le pantin (1898, trans. 1908). By reading letters, memoirs, and prefaces alongside periodical reviews and a publisher’s archive, the essay sheds light on the novels’ invisible translators and reveals the fiscal and legal viability of “domesticated decadence.” Doing so models how translation studies and book-historical methods can revise deep-set tenets of literary history. These “poisonous” epitomes of the fin de siècle in fact circulated freely across the Channel, reaching more than the happy few.

Reality Bites

Reality Bites

Aesthetics of the Closet: Material Culture, Queer Affectivity, and Robert de Montesquiou’s Art of Collecting

A series of photographs in the archives of the French writer, aesthete, and aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921) provides evidence of a form of queer collecting in fin-de-siècle Paris. Analysis of the images, all interior views of Montesquiou’s private residence, reveals a sensual relationship with Oriental objects that is distinct from the evocations of such relationships in the novels of Marcel Proust and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Employing queer theories of “affect,” this article examines an aesthetic of the closet that arises from the ambiguity conferred on cherished objects by their owner’s fantasized perceptions. The photographic reconstitution of Montesquiou’s intimate settings reveals tastes linked to japonisme—an aesthetic interpreted at the time as feminine and as a sign of concealed homosexuality. The art object can thus be seen as an affective bridge that allowed the count to exercise his eccentric taste in public and pursue his hidden loves in private.

Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde ed. by Jessica Martell et al.

Reviewed by: Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde ed. by Jessica Martell et al. Gregory Castle (bio) Modernism And Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde, edited by Jessica Martell, Adam Fajardo, and Philip Keel Geheber. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. 336 pp. $85.00. One of the more recent turns in modernist studies has been toward food and its consumption, a trend that is well represented in Modernism and Food Studies, which focuses on food aesthetics, culinary traditions and the challenges to them, the production and consumption of foodstuffs, and the concept of foodways, which Graig Uhlin, in his chapter on film, describes as the "entire life cycle of food" from [End Page 560] raw materials to sale and consumption (215). The emphasis throughout the volume falls on the "material reality of food," particularly "the cultural work" growing out of this reality, the "attitudes, perceptions, fantasies, beliefs, aesthetics, representations" that are themselves powerful determinants of the production of and access to food and foodways (5). The first section, "Aesthetics and the Body" (17-87), deals with a common motif in food studies, the act of incorporation. In the work of Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans, incorporation starts out as a form of introjection only to become, once aestheticism shades into decadence, "an object not of pleasure but of disgust" (26). The idea of the culinary thus "comes to signify the impossibility … of satisfying desires" (32). In chapters on Katherine Mansfield and Ford Madox Ford (39-55, 72-87), simple food objects become opportunities for meditations on art and reality. Aimee Gasston finds in Mansfield's writing about eggs a feminist aesthetics and an "incorporative" artistic practice that "gathers material ingredients [in order to] reproduce them as an aesthetic whole" (40),1 while Bradford Taylor finds, in Ford's "queer thoughts when digging potatoes,"2 a "pastoral idyll" that "reverses the conventional understanding of taste, rooted in Kantian aesthetics," and answers the question as to the purpose of art: "to render [the] queer effects of real life" (74, 77, 79). Randall Wilhelm's chapter on Ernest Hemingway's still lifes in A Moveable Feast makes much the same point about the casual arrangements of food and drink that reveal "fears of emasculation and sexual inadequacy through object matter that presses itself into the body and mind of his narrated self" (56-71, 67).3 In this case, food is more likely to connote projection rather than incorporation. The three chapters in the second section on "Cookbooks" focus on modernist experiments in culinary writing (89-146). As Sean Mark and Céline Mansanti show, Futurist food texts, such as Jules Maincave's Manifeste de la cuisine futuriste and Filippo Marinetti and Fillìa's The Futurist Cookbook,4 sought "to disrupt reigning gastronomic traditions" by presenting recipes for outlandish, often inedible dishes (91). Alice B. Toklas, according to Shannon Finck, may have had a more durable artistic impact in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,5 which also sought to disrupt culinary tradition. Finck traces a "queer lineage of food writing," which forms the basis of a "renegade autobiography" that "challenges the primacy of [Gertrude] Stein's narrative of their relationship" (129). The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is both a work of art and a critique of conventional foodways for, according to Finck, Toklas "queers the colonizing impulse behind a globalized cuisine by imbuing it with a liberatory politics" (140). Section III, on "Globalization, Nationalism, and the Politics of Provenance" (147-210), offers three very different ways of talking [End Page 561] about global foodways. David A. Davis writes about James Agee and Walker Evans's Cotton Tenants: Three Families,6 a study of sharecroppers originally published in Fortune, "a magazine that appeals to corporate civilization" (170). According to Davis, Agee, "a liberal intellectual artist" (170), sought in the magazine piece, as well as the expanded version published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,7 to reveal "the myriad ways in which [the sharecroppers] are trapped within a cycle of production and consumption" (172). Philip Keel Geheber offers a second approach in his analysis of Marcel Rouff's La vie et la...

L’exotisme médiéval dans les récits de voyage du XIXe siècle. Une étude de cas : Majorque

A principios del siglo XIX, Chateaubriand reveló la belleza del arte gótico en su Génie du christianisme. La Edad Media cristiana despertó el interés de historiadores y arqueólogos e inspiró el arte romántico. La literatura no estuvo exenta de este entusiasmo, desde Victor Hugo y su Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) hasta Joris-Karl Huysmans y La cathédrale (1898). También tuvo influencia en la literatura de viajes. A partir de un caso concreto, el del viaje a Mallorca, analizaremos cómo la Edad Media, su estilo gótico, sus ruinas y su fervor cristiano exaltan al viajero del siglo XIX e inundan las páginas de su relato de viaje, llenándolo de una fantasía exótica.

Dandis, cínicos e céticos: patologias do decadentismo em Wilde, Huysmans e Houellebecq

O presente ensaio busca apresentar, numa perspectiva comparatista e atualizadora, duas diferentes leituras de temas cruciais ao século XIX, como o dandismo e o decadentismo. Nesse sentido, aproxima, respectivamente, O retrato de Dorian Gray (1890), de Oscar Wilde, e Submissão (2015), de Michel Houellebecq, do romance emblemático À rebours (1884) de Joris-Karl Huysmans. Tanto a obra de Wilde, quanto a de Houellebecq, de maneiras distintas, interpretam tais questões em chaves inusitadas. O primeiro desloca seu refinamento, pelo apetite da crueldade melodramática ao explorar a margem monstruosa de sua época. O segundo desvia-se da melancolia desencantada do seu clima crepuscular, numa deriva satírica e cínica, por reconhecer a convergência entre o decadentismo novecentista e a nossa atualidade distópica e aviltada pelo avanço da desterritorialização do humano.

Eggs, sugar, grated bones: colour-based food preferences in autism, eating disorders, and beyond

In 1913, eccentric French composer Erik Satie wrote a fragmentary, diary-like essay where he depicted a strikingly rigid diet consisting solely of white foods: eggs, sugar, coconuts, rice, cream cheese,...

H. G. Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Gustatory Paradox

Abstract Beginning with a little-studied scene linking H. G. Wells’s ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours, this essay argues that a shared gustatory paradox runs from Huysmanian decadence, through the theories of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau and into Wells’s writings. In each case, both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. The argument has three major stakes. The first is to reconstruct a robust intertextual relation between the oeuvres of Huysmans and Wells. The second is to complicate readings that cast two of Wells’s scientific romances, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, as mouthpieces for imperialist or (pseudo)scientific discourses (Anger, Brantlinger, Budd, Gailor, Gregory, Hendershot, Pick). The third is to build on recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature and propose a novel interpretive method (Cozzi, Gyman, Lee). Taking up William Greenslade’s proposal that fictions construct a ‘network of resistances’ to discursive myths, I argue that gustatory scenes show Wells’s ‘network’ operating in a curious way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume Greenslade’s active role of a ‘critical, combative humanist’. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth’s structural paradox.

Not Noticing, Infallibly: The Critical Liaisons of Henry James, French Decadence, and Honoré de Balzac

Henry James published nearly a hundred articles on French literature, yet he rarely commented on its decadent doyens. After several early essays on Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, he turned a public cold shoulder to their fin-de-siècle progeny. Scholarship on Jamesian decadence has thus remained largely separate from discussions of his French criticism. This essay brings together those traditions by linking James’s sidelining of figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Pierre Louÿs with his concomitant volte-face on Honoré de Balzac. James’s late essays, I argue, creatively misread Balzac as pseudo-decadent, transmuting him into a mediating object for James’s coy, critical liaisons.

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder ed. by Jennifer Smith

Reviewed by: Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder ed. by Jennifer Smith Alexander M. Cárdenas Smith, Jennifer, editor. Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder. Bucknell UP, 2019, Pp. 236. ISBN 978-1-68448-032-6. Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder is a collection of eleven essays that present new approaches to assess Spanish writers’ and social activists’ literary and political contributions to feminism in nineteenth-century Spain. As Jennifer Smith points out in the Introduction, this collection is a tribute to the prolific academic Maryellen Bieder, one of the most relevant scholars of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, whose influential works on female Spanish writers, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and women writers who lived through the Spanish Civil War, revolutionized literary criticism by exploring issues of female identity, feminist discourse, the interplay of gender and nationality, among others. In chapter 1, Akiko Tsuchiya examines María Rosa Gálvez’s and Faustina Sáez de Melgar’s antislavery plays titled “Zinda” (1804) and “La cadena rota” (1879), respectively. As the author reveals, these plays gravitate around themes regarding gender, race and colonialism. Tsuchiya focuses, in particular, on the ways in which the female playwrights strategically deployed Romantic and neo-Romantic melodrama as a means to advocate for the rights of the colonized, the slave, and women. Christine Arkinstall relates in chapter 2 the impressive academic life of journalist, fiction writer and women’s rights activist Sofía Tartillán (1829–1888). In particular, she analyzes the ideological background that shaped Tartillán’s writings, which fiercely defended, among other rights, women’s education. Influenced by the values of Enlightenment, Realism, Krausism, Freemasonry and Republicanism, Tartillán fought for women’s inclusion in the Spanish political sphere as primary “educators of future citizens and makers of national well-being” (47). In chapter 3, Roberta Johnson explores the intertextuality among Carmen de Burgos, Georg Simmel and Gregorio Marañón with respect to defining the nature and social and individual effects of fashion. In her description of Burgos’s conception, Johnson is able to identify similarities but also radical differences with Simmel’s social interpretation and Marañón’s biological understanding of fashion. In her feminist essay La mujer moderna y sus derechos (1927), Burgos expounds fashion as closely tied to feminism, as a means through which women could emancipate themselves from patriarchal and heteronormative rules and create their own sexually empowering image. Fashion, moreover, undermines class distinctions. Susana M. McKenna studies in chapter 4 Emilia Pardo Bazán’s literary theory as drafted in “Apuntes,” which is the prologue to Los pasos de Ulloa (1886), and the ways in which such a theory in fact reflects narrative techniques (such as the framing device), metaliterature, intertextuality, and reading modalities constructed in Pardo Bazán’s fiction, especially the story “El baile del Querubín” (1891). For McKenna, the unfounded defense of the traditional over the modern and the socially accepted enclosure of women in the domestic sphere, both of which are handled with irony in the story, in fact correspond to real situations that Pardo Bazán experienced and fought to change in her fiction. In chapter 5, Linda M. Willem deploys Armine Kotin Mortimer’s concept of the second story in her analysis of some of Pardo Bazán’s stories. In the two pairs of stories explored here, namely “Presentido” (1910)—“En coche-cama” (1914) and “Confidencia” (1892)—“Madre” (1893), Willem is able to postulate that the second story in each set (published at a later date) reveals a new approach to a theme already taken in its counterpart. Furthermore, they require an active reader who could fill in the gaps, question the reliability of the narrators, distinguish between framing and embedded narrations, and find the hidden and true resolutions [End Page 291] of the conflicts in each story. Denis DuPont explores in chapter 6 the parallelisms between Pardo Bazán’s novel Dulce sueño (1911) and the French Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novels À rebours (1884), Là-bas (1891), En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898...

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission – a novel of decadence

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission has been analysed as a novel of decadence in this paper. Referring to the works of Michel Winock, François Livi and Michel Onfray, it has been found that a decadent novel can be associated not only with the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Loűys, Jean Lorrain and others produced at the end of the 19th century but also at subsequent periods. Such characteristics of decadent writing as the threat of catastrophe, fundamental changes in society, nostalgia can be found in the analysed novel.François, the main character of the novel, an expert on Huysmans and a professor at Sorbonne University, supports Huysmans’ ideas to some extent trying to find the link between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century by comparing processes in society. Huysmans sought an ideal in the Middle Ages, while François travels to Rocamadour, famous for the statue of the Black Madonna, with a hope to find a spiritual revelation but becomes aware that the world of the past has gone forever. Changes in society made Huysmans leave the monastery, similarly, François gets frustrated as he loses his job when the Muslim Fraternity comes into power.Using the dystopian genre, Houellebecq depicts unbelievable changes in society – the new government proclaims Islam an official religion of France. Society is governed by new rules, the authority is concerned about two things – demography and education. Those, who refuse to convert to Islam, lose their jobs. Changes in society are even linked with geopolitical changes. Meanwhile Houellebecq reveals significant differences between the decadence of the end of the 19th and of the 21st century. Huysmans’ decadence results in neuroses, a desire to seal himself off from the world in alcohol, drugs, etc., to surround himself with works of art, while François in Submission enjoys erotic pleasures, gradually becomes an alcoholic, he does not suffer like Huysmans’ protagonist Des Esseintes. It can be stated that Submission is a decadent novel only at thematic level since aesthetic values, characteristic of the decadence of the 19th century, are left in the background. The only justification of François is that he speaks about his conversion to Islam hypothetically, it shows that he has not made up his mind to take this step.

Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture, by Catherine Maxwell

Reviewed by: Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture by Catherine Maxwell Hans J. Rindisbacher (bio) Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture, by Catherine Maxwell; pp. xvii + 361. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £30.00, $40.95. Scholarly research and output on scent and olfactory perception across many cultural dimensions have been astounding in recent years, not least in literary culture, from high to pop literature and on to Internet blogging, where fragrance has penetrated deeply. [End Page 517] Add to this Catherine Maxwell's study Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture, which brilliantly opens up the vast territory of its title. Maxwell's method combines in-depth literary-historical knowledge and meticulous philological research with sophisticated textual interpretations, meshing into a dense web of Geertzian cultural thick description. Unfolding like a perfume in time, from the "Top Notes" in chapter 1 to "Victorian Drydown and Sillage" in chapter 8, the study sets up the Victorian age by prefacing it with select Romantic writers (Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats) and reaches into the modernism of the early twentieth century with Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie. What is more, Maxwell is equally at home in the material world of scent as she is in its literary, symbolical, and imaginary spheres. The establishing chapters 1 and 2 provide background and context for important developments in perfumery and changes in olfactory sensitivity. These chapters comparatively invoke the better explored and longer studied French literary-cultural context (Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Paul Verlaine) and sketch key trends that perfume houses such as Eugène Rimmel and Septimus Piesse both create and promote. Maxwell provides facts and context for Victorian fragrance preferences and their literary associations (violets and the idea of naturalness, love for lily of the valley, obsession with decadence and artificiality, preoccupation with the "strange flowers and heavy odours of the hothouse"), and she outlines cultural attitudes and social values expressed in fragrance, from mourning and remembrance to erotic provocation and perfumed writing (60). In the service of contextualizing the scented world of nineteenth-century England in these first two chapters and thus providing the cultural base notes for the whole book, Maxwell draws on an astonishing wealth of facts, running the gamut from ancient perfumery to twenty-first-century scent critics and artists, olfactory chemists, and fragrance bloggers, from the elixirs of Arabia and the Biblical "Song of Songs" to Chandler Burr, Jean-Claude Ellena, Sissel Tolaas, and others. The "heart note" chapters are each focused on individual Victorian writers, juxtaposed in pairs, with cross-referencing as needed, illuminating each other through their work and personal attitudes to scent. Chapter 3 thus unites Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater; chapter 4 links John Addington Symonds and Lafcadio Hearn; chapter 6 is about Michael Field (the joint nom de plume of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper); and in chapter 7 we find the decadents Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. With far over one thousand footnotes that link to and integrate a broad array of literary and cultural sources, Maxwell's is a deeply erudite book, the carefully crafted olfactory complement to her earlier Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (2009). It contains a number of black-and-white illustrations and a set of beautiful color plates, and concludes with a well-articulated index and an up-to-date, interdisciplinary bibliography. The Victorian period is a complex age in all regards, and one of the dominant social traits is a high value placed on propriety, which is often class-based, and which manifests in reticence about corporeal, sensual, and sexual matters, and in strict gender roles. Such strictures are handled a bit more loosely among the literary and artistic set, the people at the center of Maxwell's inquiry, as many of them are highly aware of and deeply enjoying the experience of scents. Maxwell teases out these complexities [End Page 518] as reflected in literary culture, and her exploration of the "unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature" in fact turns up rich source materials in primary literature, biographical writing, essays, and commentary and criticism (1). She uncovers a broad...