Chapter Six considers the modernist sculptor Eric Gill’s highly unconventional family life, his interest in Indian art, and his connections with Decadent queer Catholicism in relationship to his preoccupation with the family as a site of divine eroticism. While Gill is often thought of as a “distinctly heterosexual” figure with a highly provincial vision, during the 1910s he affiliated himself with a authors and artists, including Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael Field”), whose nonnormative sexual identities were intertwined with their Catholic religious identity, and he exhibited a thirst for information about global artistic practices, writing frequently to the Ceylonese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and engaging extensively with Indian art. He found in Bradley and Cooper, who converted to Catholicism and wrote religious verse concerning their union, a model for conceiving of incestuous desire in divine terms. In his correspondence with Coomaraswamy concerning the treatment of eroticism in Hindu temple sculpture, he found models for the successful integration of faith and sensuality. This network of influences resulted in one of his most well-known works, They (or Ecstasy, 1910-11), an attempt to hallow incestuous desire and transform an extreme form of sexual dissidence into an expression of divine love.

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.

Chapter 5 explores the lived experience of communal relations and the importance of joining art to literature by examining the poetry and verse dramas of Michael Field. This chapter looks specifically at the ways in which the couple reclassify and revitalize female tragic history by experimenting with the boundaries of literary form. As a case study that aligns with the late Victorian transition into Modernism, this chapter locates a shift in conceptions of liberal community development as Michael Field complicate critical dichotomies between Victorian and Decadent; Decadent and Modern. In so doing, I suggest that Michael Field carries traces of the liberal sympathetic experience witnessed in their life-writing into their amalgamation of specifically decadent characteristics in their poetry and verse drama. The shift toward Decadence that Michael Field marks in this project allows for a seamless move into Modernism.

The discussion of the term ‘new paganism’ in Chapter 1 notes the homophobic intimations that some critics made when addressing Algernon Swinburne’s andWalter Pater’s decadent works. However, as Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’ (1866) and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) make apparent, the intimacies that construct ecological communities are often far more amorphous or unprecedented than homophobic innuendos suggest. Chapter 3 addresses decadent desires as modes of perspectival code-switching accomplished through trans-species intimacies. Focussing on the strategic paganism in works by painter Simeon Solomon and poets Michael Field, I offer two queer models of what Henry Salt theorized, in Animals’ Rights (1892), as imaginative sympathy.

Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was a foundational text for British Decadence. John Ruskin had vilified Renaissance Italy for its moral and aesthetic depravity, but for Pater and his followers the works of artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci became vehicles for a radical aesthetic that elevated intensity of experience as the goal of life and saw art as the most crystalized form of that experience. The Renaissance offered sensual enjoyment that could transform and re-enchant the experience of modernity. This chapter argues that it was the aesthetic and moral ambiguousness of the Renaissance that appealed to the Decadent imagination – its audacious blurring of the boundaries between good and evil, the spiritual and the carnal, beauty and ugliness, legitimate and illicit pleasures; its radical unsettling of conventional demarcations of gender, sexuality, place and historical period. For Decadent writers and artists such ambiguities were intellectually and personally liberating. Renaissance Italy provided a creative space in which to explore contemporary uncertainties and to mobilize a distinctively Decadent style.

Recognizing the complexity, strangeness and variety of the Decadent interest in religion, this chapter asks what about religion proved so attractive. Noting some of the scholarly developments in this area since the turn of the twenty-first century, the chapter considers the limits of a secular purview and invites readers to join with the Decadents in seeking a more capacious understanding of what religious belief might entail. The work of reimagining belief has long been part of the life of faith, and the chapter explores this point by developing a theological account of desire in the work of Oscar Wilde and Michael Field. Just because the Christian faith is fluid and complex in the work of the Decadents, it does not follow that Decadence is inevitably heterodox. However, the Decadents’ interest in religion did sometimes take them beyond the Christian faith to other faith traditions and to mysticism and the occult.