Decadent Movement
The Decadent Movement emerged in the late 19th century as a cultural response to perceived societal decline, characterized by a fixation on decay, morbidity, and a rejection of traditional moral values. Originating primarily in France, the movement drew inspiration from historical examples of decline, such as the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and was also influenced by the gothic novel and works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Key figures included Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry encapsulated themes of despair and beauty, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel "À rebours" became a defining text of Decadence. The movement emphasized art for art’s sake, often exploring taboo subjects such as sexuality, addiction, and self-destruction.
Prominent Decadent writers reflected a sense of ennui and societal withdrawal, creating protagonists who often indulged in extreme behaviors, including sadomasochism and necrophilia. This exploration was not only a rebellion against societal norms but also a contemplation of personal identity and existential despair. The movement's legacy influenced later literary trends, including the Symbolist movement and High Modernism, which incorporated Decadent aesthetics while introducing social critique. While the movement's initial flourish was marked by a focus on individualism and self-expression, it eventually faced decline as many artists began to seek deeper meaning and engage with broader societal issues in their works.
Decadent Movement
Date c. 1884-1924
The Decadents promoted a deliberately provocative, scandalous international movement in art and literature that emphasized a cult of the aesthetic and the artificial, disparaged social and familial commitments and traditions, encouraged wide-ranging sexual practices, promoted drug use, celebrated the cultivation of the Self, and affirmed the right of the genius toward destructive and self-destructive acts.
Locale Western Europe
Key Figures
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), French novelistOscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish playwright, poet, and novelistGustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelistGabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), Italian novelist, poet, and playwrightArthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopherCharles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poetRachilde (Marguerite Eymery; 1860-1953), French novelist
Summary of Event
The concept of “decadence” originated with the idea that all things, from nations to societies to family units to the arts, inevitably sicken, decay, and die from a natural aging process such as that of the human body. The decline and fall of the Roman and the Byzantine Empires provide striking examples of past decadence and they offered warnings for the future. Secondary influences for the Decadent movement include the gothic novel and the morbid stories of American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). The hyperesthesia (extrasensitivity to physical sensations) of many Decadent protagonists reminds readers of two of Poe’s characters, Roderick Usher and William Wilson.
In France, the birthplace of the Decadent movement, intellectuals felt a sense of futility and social decline coming after the loss of Napoleonic grandeur and undisputed supremacy in Europe, after the repeated failure of the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 to establish a lasting democracy, after the country’s rapid and humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and after the rise of stultifying middle-class commercial values. From sheer boredom, the Decadents contemplated destructive and self-destructive acts. Charles Baudelaire memorably evoked decadent thinking in“Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), the opening poem of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857, 1861, 1868; Flowers of Evil, 1931).
After 1830, “frenetic” Romantics such as Pétrus Borel (1809-1859) and Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), followed by Gustave Flaubert and Baudelaire, foreshadowed the start of the Decadent movement in France and had enormous influence in England, Spain, Russia, and Italy. Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835-1836; English translation, 1887) fictionalized the life of a bisexual transvestite from the seventeenth century. The novel’s brilliant preface expounds the aesthetic doctrine of art for art’s sake. Flaubert’s immense, leprous, rotting, lustful general Hannon in Salammbô (1862; English translation, 1886) exemplifies the Decadent character, and the collapse of Carthage in this historical novel illustrates the Decadent historical vision.
The feast of sins in Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1895), and the sadistic and macabre scenes in both Gautier’s and Flaubert’s works, inspired a literature of morbidity in several countries. In 1857, the national government indicted both Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal for their alleged offenses against religion and public morals. Seven of Baudelaire’s poems with lesbian or sadistic themes, along with sarcastically amoral passages in Flaubert, were suppressed.
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against the Grain, 1922) became the bible of international Decadence, reinforced by the publication of the pessimistic poems of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). Other influences include Rachilde, Rémy de Gourmont (1858-1915), Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), Oscar Wilde , Gabriele D’Annunzio , and Robert, comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1855-1921), who was the probable model for Huysmans’s Decadent protagonist Des Esseintes and for Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) Charlus in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931, 1981). In his novel Sixtine: Roman de la vie cérébrale (1890; Very Woman: A Cerebral Novel, 1922), Gourmont’s protagonist asserted that physical pleasure is all that matters, regardless how it is obtained, and that his guiding principle for life was to avoid having children.
Wilde issued some of the most compelling theoretical statements of the movement in 1891, including that of the separation of art from life, in “The Decay of Lying” and The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891. In the intimate journal embedded within his novel Il piacere (1889; The Child of Pleasure, 1898), D’Annunzio spelled out what Huysmans and Wilde had only suggested: He found an alternate source of inspiration within the Self—the unconscious.
In feminist circles, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884), a brilliant musician and painter who died prematurely from tuberculosis, helped found a female culte du moi (cult of the Self), free from the imperatives of marriage, reproduction, and nurturance. The unexpurgated version of her journal, published in 1901, caused a scandal. Rachilde’s Mercure de France (1890-1965), cofounded with her husband Alfred Vallette, became the dominant journal of the Decadent movement. As a novelist, Rachilde was an innovator who depicted a wide range of sexual behavior, more so than did her male counterparts. She turned fetishism (Monsieur Vénus, 1884), necrophilia (La tour d’amour, 1899), bestiality (L’animale, 1893), and cross-dressing into prominent literary subjects. The renowned Paris literary salon of Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) celebrated lesbian sexuality, while the male writers of the Parisian cabaret and salon Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) celebrated male homosexuality. Barney inspired at least three notorious romans à cléf, including a novel by dancer Liane de Pougy (1869-1950), Idylle sapphique (c. 1901).
During the belle époque, between 1880 and 1914, western Europe and the British Isles enjoyed a magnificent flowering of the arts and unprecedented peace, prosperity, and economic and technological progress. At the same time, the aesthetic movement of the midcentury, which had claimed that artistic creation should be an end in itself, independent of any moral mission and any moral restraint (art for art’s sake), later developed into the international Symbolist movement, which subordinated life to art. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer , well known throughout Europe in the 1880’s, encouraged a philosophy of pessimism, undermining sensitive souls’ will to live and reproduce. The decadent title character of the Symbolist drama Axël (1890) by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-1889) persuades the woman he loves to join him in a suicide pact, arguing that living is worthy only of underlings.
The Decadents’ protagonists withdrew from society, cultivated their own personalities, and dismissed conventional morality regarding sex and sexuality, respect for the body, and the sanctity of life. They explored bestiality, sadomasochism, and necrophilia (although group sexual experience became an overt topic only in the twentieth century). They treated suicide and gratuitous murder without compunction. Prominent in works by precursors such as Poe (“The Black Cat,” 1843; “The Imp of the Perverse,” 1845; “The Telltale Heart,” 1843) and the comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse, 1846-1870), gratuitous murder returns in works of high Decadence including Jean Lorrain’s (Paul Duval, 1855-1906) Monsieur de Phocas (1901), Octave Mirbeau’s Contes Cruels (1885-1899), and Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade (1887).
Significance
From its beginning, the Decadent movement contained the seeds of its demise. Its foundational work, Huysmans’s À rebours, depicts a wealthy aristocratic protagonist who cultivates artificiality in every aspect of his life. Boredom and ill health eventually drive him from his shelter. Sequels with a new protagonist, Durtal, become increasingly autobiographical and trace the author’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Many other Decadent writers also converted, foreshadowing the Catholic Renaissance in France and the Anglican Renaissance in England during the first half of the twentieth century.
The salon of American expatriot Natalie Clifford Barney on the Left Bank of Paris remained intact far longer, exerting a strong international influence on women’s rights movements until at least the 1930’s.
After World War I, High Modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot , James Joyce , and Marcel Proust perpetuated the Decadent style, but they increasingly combined it with social critique. Eventually, Thomas Mann’s (1875-1955) novella Der Tod in Venedig (1922; Death in Venice, 1925) and Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus, 1948) rejected the exclusive cult of art and of the Self.
Decadence was seen once more in 1920’s Chicago, Illinois, popularized by the Chicago Tribune’s book reviews and led by the crime reporter Ben Hecht (1894-1964), a circus acrobat as a child. Hecht later became close friends with Dada artist Georg Grosz in Berlin. Hecht’s flamboyant novels Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922), Gargoyles (1922), and The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare (1924) introduced a sensational, satanic form of Decadence to American popular culture. Hecht later became an influential Hollywood producer, with seventy novels and screenplays to his credit.
Bibliography
Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. Edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. A synthesis from the standpoint of poststructuralist criticism.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. A classic philosophical background to Decadence in Germany and Italy.
Constable, Liz, et al., eds. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Treats many major international figures, including writers from Nicaragua, Belgium, Spain, and Sweden.
Porter, Laurence M. “Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel.” In The French Novel from 1800 to the Present, edited by Timothy Unwin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. An overview of the Decadent movement in France.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Huysmans’ ’À rebours’: The Psychodynamics of Regression.” American Imago 44, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 51-65. Discusses how an unconscious drive toward health eventually reintegrates Des Esseintes with society.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Literary Structure and the Concept of Decadence: Huysmans, D’Annunzio, and Wilde.” Centennial Review 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1978): 188-200. Discusses how the greatest Decadent writers symbolize and dramatize the role of the unconscious in their protagonists.
Weir, David. Decadence and the Makings of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Examines the aftermath of the Decadent movement in the United States.