Chapter 9 - Aestheticism and Decadence

Summary

James explored Aestheticism in his fiction as early as Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Europeans (1878), where he analyzes it through the figures of the dandy and the flâneur, who both play central roles in Aestheticism and Decadence. In 1879–84, the height of the craze for depictions of aesthetic young men and women, the idea of Aestheticism crystallized for James and he developed sharp renditions of characters that could be recognized as aesthetes analogous to those one might find in the pages of Pater or Punch (Figure 1). These included ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ and The Portrait of a Lady, as well as The Tragic Muse, where the disturbing Gabriel Nash represents Wildean Aestheticism with a Jamesian shading.

By the mid 1890s Decadent Aestheticism had begun to choke the movement’s milder, more innocent forms. By the end of the decade, a mouldy, overpowering scent of depravity had irrevocably infused itself into Aestheticism’s delicately perfumed pages. ‘The bad smell has, as it were, to be accounted for’, James wrote in an essay of 1904 that grappled with Aestheticism’s reputation for vulgarity. ‘And yet where, amid the roses and lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and fragrances, can such a thing possibly be?’ (LC-2, 935). Decadence and Aestheticism had grown up alongside each other like plants sharing the same soil. Over time, decadence’s poor but hearty equivalent, immorality, began to encroach until, in the mid 1890s, Aestheticism was choked by the tangle. The purpose of this chapter is to situate James in the context of Aestheticism and Decadence and the controversies surrounding these movements.