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Chapter 22 - The Gender of Decadence: Paris-Lesbos from the Fin de Siècle to the Interwar Era

from Part III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2019

By
Deborah Longworth
Edited by
Jane Desmarais  and
David Weir
Jane Desmarais
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths, University of London
David Weir
Affiliation:
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
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Summary

Paris from 1900 to 1940 experienced a remarkable revival of artistic culture, including surrealism in poetry and painting, poetic realism in cinema, and much more. Parallel with these developments are the lesser-known but equally remarkable activities of the ‘women of the left bank’ who gave expression to same-sex concerns in both their poetry and their lives and so form the socio-cultural tradition known as ‘Paris-Lesbos’. The tradition is one legacy of fin-de-siècle decadence whose principal practitioners are Renée Vivien (pseudonym of Pauline Tarn), translator of Sappho and decadent poet, and Natalie Barney, the multi-millionaire heiress and unashamedly self-proclaimed lesbian whose literary connections and love affairs placed her at the centre of the legend of ‘Paris-Lesbos’. Their work involves a complex intersection of decadence, ‘sapphism’, and ‘sapphic fiction’ and includes the feminist and lesbian reappropriation of Sapphic decadence at the turn of the century and a later revival of the decadent mystique of the lesbian as a ‘femmes damnée’ in the 1920s and 1930s.

Keywords

genderdecadenceLongworthSapphic fictionlesbianismmystiquesexualityrealismVivienBarney
Type
Chapter
Information
Decadence and Literature , pp. 362 - 378
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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