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The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rita Felski
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Abstract

The texts of the late-nineteenth-century European male avant-garde reflect an imaginary identification with the feminine. Examined here with specific reference to Huysmans's Against the Grain, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, this topos is evident both in the representation of “feminized” male subjects (the aesthete and the dandy) and in a self-conscious writing practice that foregrounds style, parody, and quotation. While ostensibly challenging sexual and textual norms through a subversion of bourgeois masculinity and realist aesthetics, these works in fact reinforce gender dichotomies by persistently associating woman with vulgarity, materiality, and the tyranny of the natural. The preference for art over nature in early modernism thus reveals a misogynistic dimension that is intimately linked to, rather than dissolved by, its parodistic and antirealist aesthetic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 5 , October 1991 , pp. 1094 - 1105
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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