Dennis Denisoff

The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats

Dennis Denisoff is Associate Professor in the English Department at Ryerson University in Toronto. His publications include Aestheticism and Sexual Parody (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), and the co-edited essay collection Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). His current monograph project is tentatively entitled Dissipative Nature: The Eco-Pagan Vein of British Decadence. modernism / modernity volume fifteen, number three, pp 431–446.

Decadence and aestheticism

Decadence, decadence, you are all decadent nowadays. Thus bewails the hyper-conservative critic in the essay that Hubert Crackanthorpe published in the second volume of the journal The Yellow Book . Yet while Crackanthorpe was mocking the critics, decadence and aestheticism were a major source of contention from the moment they began flaunting their dissident passions before the British public in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1890s, many had had enough of the mix of aesthetic idealism, taunting self-display, uncommon sexuality and degeneracy that had become packaged as their defining characteristics. Max Nordau devoted an entire chapter of Degeneration (1892) to chastising both for encouraging pessimism, sexual aberrancy, mysticism and poor taste in clothing. While we might now find Nordaus extremism laughable, his contemporaries did not cast him aside as quickly. Similar arguments were being made even by artists and writers. George Du Maurier, for example, has the hero of his novel The Martian (1898) attack aesthetes as little misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions. Even contributors to the Aesthetic or Decadent movement - such as Richard le Gallienne, Vernon Lee and Walter Pater - voiced displeasure with some of their qualities. Meanwhile, late aestheticist and decadent works such as Aubrey Beardsleys drawings and Ada Leversons short stories imply that the movements had in fact fallen into self-parody.

Women’s Nature and the Neo-Pagan Movement

Paganism’s ubiquity among late Victorian and Edwardian women is apparent from three passing references that appeared in The Yellow Book (1894–1897) in relatively close succession. In an essay published in January 1896, Julie Norregaard (whose name appears in the periodical as Norregard; 1863–1942) depicts the Danish author Georg Brandes as arguing for a harmony of pagan and feminist values. Brandes ‘means the two sexes to have equal rights and equal freedom’, she writes, ‘But he has no sympathy with the woman who, because she works and fights her own battles, must throw to the winds all grace and beauty. […] As a true pagan, he loves to be surrounded by youth and loveliness.’ According to Norregaard, Brandes sees the fight for gender equality as justified but only if women retain their supposedly innate, natural qualities. The noun ‘pagan’ here is used principally as a euphemism for the male aesthete, the emphasis being placed on the man’s vigorous sensuality. Women who do not appeal to Brandes’ tastes, however, have somehow replaced their inherent beauty with the artifice that comes with battling for equal rights. In ‘Suggestion’—published nine months earlier, in April 1895—Ada Leverson (1862–1933) makes the gender inequity more apparent. Her story describes the studio of a male aesthete as giving ‘the complex impression of being at once the calm retreat of a medieval saint and the luxurious abode of a modern Pagan. One feels that everything could be done there, everything from praying to flirting’. Like Norregaard, Leverson associates the ‘pagan’ with the male aesthete, but the emphasis now is placed not on women’s politicized gender performance but on the erotic exploits of men. The fashionable pagan-about-town captured by Norregaard and Leverson had, by the 1890s, become a male characterized primarily by a sexual liberalism (or libertinism) that did not readily translate to women’s rights and freedoms of self-fashioning.

Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century by Anne Stiles (review)

where it is going. This is only one small section of the book, however, and even here the discussion remains of interest. The Camera as Historian will appeal to scholars of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Britain, to historians of history, and to those interested in photography more generally. It reshapes our understanding of the previously neglected Survey Movement and makes a strong case for the importance of material considerations in analyses of photography. Edwards’s book will stand as a landmark scholarly achievement for years to come.